April Fools Day / Web Original

Web Animation

• For 2022, Animated Inanimate Battle had a joke episode called "The Phantom Menace", which featured a character exclusive to that episode, Evil Oodle 4S, who parodied the "evil host/host's rival" stereotype from other Object Shows.
• The asdfmovie series: two days before April Fools' Day 2011, creator TomSka and animator RageNineteen responded to fan ZxHeiserxZ's request "Make an ASDF film/movie for like 20 mins or so :D" by making the Stylistic Suck-filled THE TWENTY MINUTE ASDFMOVIE in 20 minutes.
• Battle for Dream Island:
  • Episode 16 begins with the announcement that due to budget cuts (a Running Gag throughout BFDI) the episode would be animated using puppets. This goes on for a couple of minutes until the art style shifts back to normal and the characters tell the viewer that was all just an April Fools' Day prank.
  • For a more traditional prank, one day before episode 25 was released, a fake episode 25 was released, and it's just as bad as you'd think it'd be. It does refer to the characters of Foldy, Stapy and Liy years before they'd appear in Battle for BFDI, however.
  • Episode 11 of BFDIA was released on April 1st, 2024, and while the episode itself is legit, it begins with the character Jack Frew from Michael Huang's very old animation I Can Make a Difference! (it's even older than X Finds Out His Value!) interacting with Fries, who proceeds to incapacitate him before telling the viewer "April Fools!" and fading away, leaving only his hair behind, which shows up a couple more times throughout the episode.
• Every April 1, Viva Reverie uploads a video related to her But Really Really Fast series, which tends to be more nonsensical than the norm such as...
  • 2019: The first Really Really Fast video going really really slow instead.
  • 2020: Recapping Viva's library of work while framed as Jotaro going on a search for Josuke.
  • 2021: Viva directly addresses her creations as the Narrator to talk about the creative process (And then announces that a Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan video will be released just a few days later).
  • 2022: Recapping the entire JoJo series thus far while going so fast that none of the characters has time to get off the set before the next arc starts).
  • 2023: Giorno eats King Crimson and has Phoenix Wright try to convince everyone that it was only an image of him.
  • 2024: La Squadra has an early Halloween, and Ghiaccio takes some time to complain about Articuno's change in designs following Pokémon Yellow.
• Fallout Lore: The Storyteller teamed up with another channel in 2016 to do a non-canon episode on the sexbot known as Fisto... and even had a link at the end of the episode that brought anyone who hit it to a video that started with them being told they'd been April Fool'd.
• hololive:
  • For April Fools' Day 2022, the members of Hololive English's Council swapped performers. Their avatars remained the same, but they were each played by a different idol. Kronii was Sana, Sana was Fauna, Fauna was Bae, Bae was Mumei, Mumei was IRyS, and IRyS was Kronii. The streams involved Character Exaggeration, taking an idol's more notable traits and cranking them up, such as IRyS-as-Kronii taking Kronii's Narcissist tendencies all the way up to suggesting that Kronii wants to date and sleep with herself. It also involved the idols trying to imitate vocal tones and accents of whomever they were impersonating (such as Kronii, who is Canadian, attempting to maintain an Australian accent while impersonating Sana).
  • The following year, the Holostars English group TEMPUS got in on the fun as well. Not only did the Vanguard half swap VAs^*Shinri with Bettel, Flayon with Hakka, but the HQ half also held mock debuts for four new members of the guild^*Vesper as Morf LeRoch, Axel as Gorira Manager, Magni as Cl0pbot, and Altare as Justa Worm.
  • 2024 saw a variety of pranks: Ookami Mio's news having joke stories involving soumen and Miofa updates along with genuine news of a new cover, Botan getting a more lionlike model, Fauna's Minecraft stream done in HyperCam 2, Advent having to save one of their own members from a curse, and Holostars ARMIS doing a belated announcement while swapping VAs^*Jurard with Ruze, Goldbullet with Octavio.
• Homestar Runner has done a few April Fools' Jokes.
  • In 2003, homestarrunner.com became kingoftown.com, complete with a new intro and main page featuring the not-at-all-popular incompetent ruler of Free Country, USA. ("King of Town! Hooray!")
  • In 2004, the site was replaced with a bogus domain registration site from the fictional Thorax Corporation... which was actually a flash cartoon where Stinkoman showed up to fight an animated GIF of a shovel-wielding stick figure. ("Hey, Stickly Man, whaaaat are you doing?")
  • In 2005, the site was replaced with a (fake) main page for a subscription service, HomestarRunner.com Pay PLUS!
  • In 2006, all the cartoons and main pages on the site were flipped upside-down. This caused some problems with Action Script on the site, including affecting the Strong Bad Email "Virus".
  • In 2009, the Monday before had featured a cartoon called "Sbemailiarized Entertainment", in which after a long lack of Strong Bad E-mails, Strong Bad decided there wasn't really a big difference between sbemails and other cartoons, and he could just stick himself answering an e-mail at the beginning and end of any old cartoon and it would work. After a very long prank hiatus, the day itself had the intro movie replaced by a Sbemailiarized version.
  • In 2010, the site's intro was suddenly replaced with HSR Xeriouxly Forxe, a parody of Darker and Edgier reboots.
    Revamped for the nineties!
    So much more exciting!
    Pointy elbows and lots of lightning!
    Edgy and angry, so zesty and tangy!
  • In 2014, the site got its first update in 4 years! The new toon is full of Homestar and Strong Bad lampshading how the site hasn't been updated in such a long time, and the two update aspects of the site that are mere footnotes from the site's early days (including what seems like a tease for a new Strong Bad Email... that ends with minor updates to the all-but-forgotten Windows 98 desktop themes).
  • In 2015, the site announced the first Strong Bad Email in about 5 years. The actual video has Strong Bad trying to read emails off various electronic appliances before remembering he has a computer. When he realizes it's April Fool's Day, Strong Bad refuses to answer any emails and starts to rant about how the internet ruined the holiday. He then decides to celebrate April Fool's Day the traditional way; by pranking people in person. He finally waits until midnight (in-universe) so that it's not April 1 any more, and decides to check an e-mail for real. At which point the cartoon abruptly ends with "April Fools!"
  • In 2016, they released the first episode of Marzipan's Answering Machine in about seven years... which resulted in a massive backlog and nearly thirty minutes of messages, detailing various gags and Noodle Incidents that happened in that period of time, including Coach Z getting arrested, Strong Sad trying to reinvent himself, Homestar getting obsessed with such fleeting fads as planking and the Ouya, and Strong Bad prank-calling Marzipan.
  • In 2018 they uploaded "The Next April Fool's Thing", a short where a crudely drawn little girl makes up the story as it's happening, and after a while she sets up an Overly Long Gag featuring a loading screen that lasts a hundred seconds. Then, a new Strong Bad Email interrupts that short... and then, after that is done too, the little girl short ends with Stinkoman punching Bubs so hard he flies off into space.
• Inanimate Insanity:
  • On April 1st 2015, a video was released which started with the cast appearing to be killed due to the overflow of views on Inanimate Insanity II... only for the typical April Fools Day horn to play and for an update to the store to be announced.^note This was the climax of a completely different prank Adam tried to pull, but it backfired spectacularly.
• YouTube animator Mike Inel is known for creating well-thought out and detailed fake trailers every April Fools' Day that gains the ire of viewers who solemnly desire for the advertised product to be made. These have included a crossover between Invader Zim and Haruhi Suzumiya; an animated film adaptation of the horror games The Witch's House, Ib, Mad Father; an animated short series featuring music videos for all the bands in Splatoon 2; and a Splatoon mobile spin-off game called Splatoon Island.
• Overly Sarcastic Productions sees an April Fools episode every year since 2016.
  • 2016 saw the (in)famous Les Misérables video, responding to suggestions that Blue take over some drawing duties and criticisms that Red speaks too fast and with not enough detail. This results in horrendous scribbles for the artwork (Blue did not have a firm grasp of the intricacies of a drawing tablet) and a stilted, halting delivery from Red as she attempted to be as informative as possible. The pair barely last five minutes before abandoning the video with screams of physical pain and cringe.
  • In 2017, they uploaded the first episode of what would be their "OSPlays" Let's Play series. Notably, since it's an April Fools episode, it's done parodying the style of a typical loud, high-octane Let's Play, compared to later OSPlays episodes which are more subdued.
  • In 2018, Red and Blue uploaded a video in which they admitted to being the secret masterminds responsible for every disaster in human history in the form of a YouTuber Apology Parody.
  • 2019's April Fools episode parodies cooking channels, and sees the two preparing the dish "Carthaginian Delight", inspired by the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. Instructions include adding "Hannibal Barca's blood" and "salt the Earth" (cue Blue throwing an entire bowl of salt into a pan).
  • 2020 sees the continuation of the Journey to the West series... as a Minecraft Let's Play.
  • In 2021, the duo just uploaded a 4 minute video of Blue's cat Cleo, titled "The Cleo Cameo".
  • 2022 is initially set up to be Red doing a summary of The Silmarillion, but then (animated) Red goes off-camera in order to have some tea and a chat with Blue, and (also animated) Cleo knocks over the camera and chews on some wires, ending the show prematurely.
• Phase-Connect announces a shift into the coffee industry in 2024, with some of its talents shilling the new branding.
• Red vs. Blue released The Last Episode Ever in 2004. It still is in the season's playlist as "Episode 28.5" (the actual episode 29 came out on April 9). And it is probably Rooster Teeth's only April Fool's prank, as the company was founded on April 1 and thus takes its anniversary seriously.
• For Starters, the creator showed the "unaired pilot". It's just a younger version of Dane (the creator) playing with two poorly-drawn pictures of Pikachu and Squirtle on popsicle sticks doing skits.
• In 2008, Super Mario Bros. Z creator Alvin Earthworm made an animation of the head from Mario Teaches Typing 2 giving a Rickroll. See it here.
  • In 2009, he redid a fight scene from the most recent episode, but with all the characters' sprites replaced by images of Sprite cans. In addition, the background was replaced with sausage packs.
  • In 2010, Luigi is Dio Brando.
• TOME:
  • In 2015, a "special episode" was released. It was announced as an original episode that follows the characters on a important quest. Though the extremely Deranged Animation makes it quite hard to be taken seriously.
  • April Fool's Day 2020 had Kirbopher post a video labeled TTA Episode 074 (the original series). For the first four minutes, it actually does seem like a real episode. Then it turns into an Overly Long Gag that goes on for sixteen minutes.
• In the Undertale parody Underpants, the Genocide ending was released on April 1st. The 'Genocide ending' is just a repeated animation of a weird looking Sans (called SANAESSSS) while a version of Megalovania played by Sr Pelo (titled Megalovonio) plays in the background. The real Genocide ending was then released months later.
• Zero Punctuation's April Fools gags:
  • In 2009, the hosts of Unskippable pretended to stage a Hostile Show Takeover and reviewed X-Blades before Yahtzee seized the show back to review Halo Wars. Yahtzee also guest-commentated on Unskippable.
  • In 2010, the usually Motor Mouth Yahtzee recited Ode to Melancholy in a very slow, ponderous manner.

Webcomics

• In late March 2006, the Chris Hastings and Kent Archer of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja posted on the site news that they thought they were being stalked by ninjas. On April 1, this was followed up by a post in which the ninjas killed Hastings and Archer, then imitated them and announced the end of the comic.
  • In 2008, they put up this comic, which was only slightly odder than the comic's usual fare.
    • In 2009 they began a new campaign of in-strip product placement, while on the newly fan-run forums a campaign of McNinja-themed word filtering of random phrases was enacted.
    • In 2013, Spider-Man bursts in to save the day, and brings along Gandalf, Robocop, Boba Fett, and Mario.
    • In 2014, Chris Hastings posted that he was experimenting with a new style that would help him make more comics, faster. The new style was the Dinosaur Comics template.
• The Book of Biff did this at least twice. In both instances, an established element of the comic is rendered differently and the author blocks out any comments pointing these out. The very next day he unblocks the comments, posts the non-joke version of the same comic, and moves the joke comic to a different page.
  • In 2008, Biff's face looks normal.
  • In 2009, Biff speaks!
• In 2009, Brawl in the Family was briefly replaced with the rather bizarre Waluigi in the Family, or WitF, starring Waluigi. It updated 17 times over the course of the day. The eight-digit strip numbers were a nice touch.
  • In 2010, the front page was adorned with a "letter from Nintendo" ordering the comic to shut down. It listed the comics that Nintendo had issue with, and their offenses. In summary, the letter ordered the comic to shut down because Waluigi hates it. Underneath the letter, there were also new Waluigi in the Family comics.
  • In 2011, the comic was called "Philips' Box", with its jokes based on the CD-i games. The main story was that Mario hits a box, freeing the spirits of the CD-i games. Over time, King Dedede goes crazy since Kirby, Waddle Dee and Adeline had been possessed by the spirits and wonders what could end their insanity. At that moment, Waluigi comes back from his vacation and scares the spirits away back into the box.
  • In 2012, the author was sick, so he wrote a Waluigi apology letter.
  • In 2013, he announced he was turning the webcomic into a Playstation All Stars Battle Royale fancomic.
  • In 2014, the author brought back Waluigi in the Family, concluding with a comic in which Daisy and Luigi tell Waluigi that the joke has worn out and he should stop. Waluigi then shifts to a more on-model appearance than usual and mopes to his house... only to find Wario that suggests him to move on and take over the other Nintendo franchises instead of just the comic. The day after, a whole series of comics where Wario and Waluigi replace the main characters in various Nintendo games was posted, ending with Waluigi being sealed into the Assist Trophy item to stop his madness.
  • The comic was still at it even in 2015, after the comic had officially ended! An image was posted on the front page of the website, claiming Brawl in the Family had been uncancelled. Then you scroll down... "Just kidding."
• In 2008, Darths & Droids (which uses images from the Star Wars films) claimed they had received a cease-and-desist letter from Lucasfilm, and would henceforth be making the comic using photographs of themselves re-enacting the films. (Move mouse over the comic image)
  • In 2010 the narrative switched from being a gaming session into a The Princess Bride tribute.
• In 2009, The Chosen Four was taken over by Porky,◊ who declared himself the new lead of the comic.
• Queen of Wands very briefly put up a shot of one of the characters tearfully confessing she was pregnant, to fan concern. Soon after, this was replaced by a different, jokey comic. Later in the Story Arc, the same pregnancy scene was used exactly and unironically. On April 1st.
• In 2008, Dinosaur Comics, Questionable Content, and xkcd all temporarily stole each other's websites.
• In 2009, the author of Goblins claimed that the author of Least I Could Do had used one of his characters without permission and that he was suing.
• In 2008, Gunnerkrigg Court replaced the latest page (at the time) with this.◊
• The splash page released on April 1st 2019 for chapter 5 of Legio Arcana revealed a love triangle plot complete with Thalia sweeping Tim off his feet
• Nature of Nature's Art added a temporary panel one April Fools' Day where, after Meander kills Rule, the corpse gets back up and says, BOO.
  • 2010's April Fool's joke is an elaborate and surprisingly thoughtful comic about a sullen looking man who adopts a Pikachu, Shows it enough of the world and all of its good and evil that it becomes enlightened, and uses it to win a tournament. It really has to be seen to be believed.
  • 2011 continued the tradition with a comic about a man who creates "the next human brain". And then the Pikachu from last year's April Fools comic shows up and takes him into another dimension. Or something like that. It's a bit of a Mind Screw.
• For 2008, in The Phoenix Requiem, Jonas gets into his TARDIS and vanishes (pictured above).
• In 2009, Shortpacked! ran this Roomies! comic, with the explanation that, since the Shortpacked! storyline had become fundamentally broken, Willis was doing a reboot of the entire Walkyverse.
  • Which is now Hilarious in Hindsight with the coming of Dumbing of Age...
  • In prior years, Willis ran Dinosaur Comics-esque strips, recycling the artwork in subsequent years in Dinosaur Comics fashion.
  • One prank in particular April Fools changed Shortpacked's site layout to that of "Evil Twin" McAwesome's which in fact, introduced them.
  • In 2015, the strip (having ended in January) Came Back Wrong.
• In 2008, The Wotch celebrated by having Robin abruptly decide, "Oh, who cares if this makes sense or not, I'm doin' it!" and dramatically smooch Cassie◊. 2009 took a different angle by saying that since Anne (the author) had hurt her arm, which she had, Jason would be taking over the artwork for the next month. It actually went over pretty well, even among those who bought it.
• El Goonish Shive had not one but two non-canon arcs for April Fools' Day, the first (called April Fool's Week) consisted of odd fillers that featured things like Tedd and Sarah making out^note This scenario (Tedd and Sarah being in a relationship) may eventually be canon (albeit with Grace in a ménage à trois) since (thanks to character development) Sarah has canonically called Tedd cute and they've seen each other naked multiple times. Also, they've probably kissed at least once., Sarah becoming a Were-Squirrel and the page not actually being drawn one day. The second (known as II slooF lirpA) followed Dan accidentally altering the rules of the dimension, transforming all the characters.
• The Whiteboard has done an AFD strip since the first one after the strip began, most of them playing on the general theme of Fanservice. In 2009, the author changed the front page to look like a directory listing, including folders for "alternate storylines", a "passwords" text document, and a well-executed Rickroll. Readers actually called the site's host to warn them of the security hole.
• xkcd has an April Fools related comic or event almost every year.
  • 2008 sees the infamous #404 "strip"; xkcd famously skipped #404 and went from #403 to #405, and thus attempting to look up a #404 XKCD comic yields a standard Page Not Found error, although this is treated as if it was its own strip.
  • In 2010, xkcd redid its main page to look like a Unix terminal, complete with a command line interface and MUD Shout-Out jokes (type "look", or "go south"). You can still find the terminal here.
  • For 2011, all of XKCD's comics are in 3D. This is also still findable. Doubles as a Hypocritical Humor given the actual strip posted on the same day.
  • 2012's "Umwelt" which becomes completely different comics on different web browsers or operating systems, and sometimes even changes due to your physical location on Earth. One appeared only to people who signed up to see Randall's talk at CNU.
  • 2013's "Externalities" is bundled with a competition for university students to break a Skein hash, and also an appeal to donate to the Wikimedia foundation. The comic's panels constantly changes as students attempt to break the hash and donate to Wikimedia, among other things. Unfortunately, the comic seems to have broke as of 2019, showing only a blank page when viewed.
  • 2014's "Lorenz" is an interactive short choose-your-own-adventure comic. At one point, readers were even able to suggest their own lines for the story. The title was in honor of Edward Norton Lorenz, the mathematician who founded the modern chaos theory.
  • 2015's "XKCloud" is another interactive comic, where the character in the comic admits to have lost all their data thanks to a flimsy cloud setup and asks readers to help them combine which images go to which pictures and vice versa. Readers were even able to submit their own drawings or text.
  • 2016's "Garden" is a gardening simulator game. You start off with a light, and if you wait for long enough, plants will grow. You can add more lights or even change the lights' colors and an assortment of other things besides plants will pop out of the ground.
  • 2018's "Right Click" encourages readers to right click on the comic to save the full image. However, right clicking on the image would give an utterly nonsensical right click prompt, full of secrets, jokes, games, endless nesting, and references to past XKCD comics.^note The full image can actually be saved, it just takes a ton of digging.
  • 2019's "Emojidome" pits hundreds of emojis against each other by viewer voting. In the end, the two winners are the Milky Way emoji (🌌) at #1 and the Hedgehog emoji (🦔) at #2, which were featured in the final comic image.
  • 2020's "Collector's Edition" sends readers on a scavenger hunt for items scattered through other XKCD comic pages, and encourages them to bring them over back to the "Collector's Edition" page and put them there to showcase them.
  • 2021's "Checkbox" shows only a single checkbox, which clears itself when checked. An unmute button is also provided. Readers can input messages on the checkbox in Morse code, by timing the presses on the checkbox. In return, should the unmute button be clicked beforehand, the checkbox will reply back to them, also in Morse code.
  • 2022's "Instructions", similarly to last year, shows only a single check bubble. But when pressed, it starts playing audio of a Bob Ross-esque tutorial about how to create a picture using just programming commands.
• In 2010, Questionable Content updated with a page straight out of Magical Love Gentleman, complete with matching page layout. Glowing crotches are involved.
• In 2010, Dinosaur Comics replaced the entire cast with Nedroid characters (Reginald in place of T. Rex, Beartato in place of Utahraptor, etc). Not just in the latest page, but in the entire archives.
• In 2010, Unwinder's Tall Comics changed its name and format to Unwinder's Short Comics.
• In 2010 the Dresden Codak website was given a Le Film Artistique paintjob by This video.
  • And again in 2012.
• In 2009, Several characters from Namir Deiter and You Say It First (both drawn and written by the same people) ware swapped for each other, with the dialog for both comics remaining unaltered. In 2010, both comics were drawn with the characters appearing as human.
• The KAMics in 2005 KAM quit which actually started off a short storyline; in 2009, to wrap up a humorous disagreement between him & the author of Magical Misfits, did this; and in 2010 turned it into an April Fools Month turning his various characters into ponies.
• While Holiday Wars has never done a special for April Fools' Day, it does include it as a character. It's portrayed as a shapeshifting prankster enslaved to the Easter Bunny.
• Bittersweet Candy Bowl, "In The End"
• In 2011, Here Wolf was replaced by the fake comic Stupid Priest.
• Femmegasm and World of Fizz swapped artists for April Fools Day in 2011.
• In Impure Blood, the author and the artist traded roles for the strip.
• In 2011, Beyond the Canopy briefly turned into a parody of Fist of the North Star.
• In 2002, 8-Bit Theater had Garland destroy the universe.
• Far Out There pulled the fake "ending" gag in 2009 and again in 2010.
  • 2011's April Fools began a tradition of "debuting" a drastically new style: first Dada Comics, followed by Sprite Comics in 2012, Magical Girl in 2013, and Sentai in 2014.
• In 2012, Homestuck did two fake updates that set off the update notifiers without actually adding or changing anything. The actual updates that fell on April 1 involved the Eldritch Abomination Greater-Scope Villain killing the Author Avatar, so they seemed like jokes—but turned out to be a real plot development.
• Evil Plan The Webcomic pulls something every year.
  • In 2010, they posted what looked like a repeat update of the last page. It was actually a gif, and after a few seconds, it degenerated into an edited ZALGO mess, complete with blood pouring from the characters' eyes.
  • In 2011, they had an obviously fake link to download a fictional theme song for the comic. Turned out that the link really DID go to a theme song, by Andrew of Songs to Wear Pants To.
  • In 2012, they redesigned the site and did "Planstuck," parodying Homestuck's art style and use of gifs. The artist updated throughout the day based on comments from the readers, finally clocking in at 95 updates.
• In 2012, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella replaced their homepage with No-Nad Ventures, a company selling fake testicles for neutered pets.
• In 2012, Cucumber Quest was abruptly retooled as the testosterone-fueled Cuke or Die II: Cuke Harder. (Preserved here.)
  • In 2013, all the characters were redrawn to resemble Bacon (i.e. pudgy and piglike), both on the latest page◊ and the character profiles. And all the text on those character profiles was written from Bacon's perspective.
  • In 2014, the comic was revamped as Kukobu Quest, resembling a teen's awkward first attempt at a manga-style comic. At the end of the day, Gigi posted to explain that Kukobu actually was her very first draft of the story that eventually became Cucumber Quest.
• Educomix
  • In the 2011 April Fools' Day strip, Ma'am played a trick on Eyeclops.
  • The 2012 April Fools' Day strip was an edit of the first ever strip that changed the ending.
• Although Irregular Webcomic! doesn't usually do April Fool jokes, in 2007 the author made a comic where he appeared formally dressed and announced the comic's discontinuation due to a lawsuit involving every company with copyrights on various elements he used for his comic, with the inexplicable addition of Disney.
• Commander Kitty has had a couple during its run, starting with a stick figure comic, and then followed the next year with the cast as turning into ponies.
• But I'm a Cat Person for the first time in 2013, fulfilling about a dozen 'ships at once.
  • And again in 2016, giving a new (in-universe) meaning to 'cat person'.
• Poppy O'Possum in 2014 announced a number of drastic changes to the comic on April 1st. However, the next day's comics revealed that the real joke was that there was a bit of canon in it, Kit actually is blind.
• Leif & Thorn in 2016, interrupting a dramatic fight scene.
• Consolers started doing April Fool's jokes in 2015 when Zanreo announced that she had lost most of her interest in console games and the comic would from now on focus more on mobile games, especially Apple. This was obviously a joke.
  • In 2016, Zanreo claimed she was opening up an online store selling various merchandise, getting weirder and weirder, starting with t-shirts and mugs, up to body pillows and trash cans.
• Ozy and Millie did an April Fool's Day strip with most of the cast acting drastically out of character. Except for Millie's Mom who, being a lawyer, acts as the legal disclaimer.
• Whomp!'s April 1, 2019 installment has Ronnie lose weight, shave, gain a new happy attitude, and promise to make his comic uplifting and optimistic with "inspirational stories to lift spirits". A day later, the same comic was reposted with a... darker style.
• Schlock Mercenary for April 2001 did not have an extended April Fool's joke, despite having a rather unusual sequence where the main characters are mysteriously captured and killed. Next year, the author did a conventional April Fools' comic by resurrecting a dead character.
• Sluggy Freelance Guest Strip by Clay Yount for April 1 2006 has the page start loading a comic in which you can see some new invention by Riff has made Zoë's clothes disappear. And the loading stalls at a place when there's just no way you're not going to see her naked breasts next, even though the comic never features such content. Then the top of the loading strip crashes down with an audible sound, because the "loading" was really an animation all along. (Sadly, it was made in Adobe Flash, so it's no longer available.)
• Wooden Plank Studios: In April 1, 2022, during the Everyone Is Home revival storyline, a comic was released during the group's visit to Elden Ring, which is sidetracked when they are asked to look for a pet and spend several pages looking at a Red Herring.
• During the week of April Fool's Day 2021, Erika Moen's webcomic Oh Joy Sex Toy (where Erika reviews sex toys and gives sexual health advice) was taken over by her cat, who turned the comic into Oh Joy Cat Toy and reviewed his favorite cat toys, though he only speaks in meows.
• Persona 5 Adult Confidant AU: For April Fools 2020, Scruffy announced that he would be scrapping the ACAU in favor of an ACAU version of Persona 4 called the Adult Social Link AU, or ASLAU for short. Among other things, Teddie and the Fox were swapped, leading to the mascot Foxy and a Real Fucking Bear. An actual scene from the ASLAU was made after Persona 4: Golden was ported to Steam, which had Ryotaro traveling under the rain with transfer student Izanami.

Websites

• On 2013, two blogs by sports-related cooks - a serious one and a Cordon Bleugh Chef - switchedplaces.
• 4chan:
  • The site once added the /fur/ channel on April 1st, despite much of 4chan's userbase unanimously disliking furries. The userbase was shocked to see it still up on April 2nd. Then they were infuriated when it was still up on April 3rd. On April 4th moot closed the channel and permabanned everyone who had posted in it. The April Fur's Day prank is today considered one of the better things the staff have done. This prank is such a legendary cornerstone of the 4chan community that, when moot added a /mlp/ board to stem the sheer number of pony threads on /co/, it was immediately assumed by the majority of the users that the staff were up to their old tricks with an early April Fools prank; it got so accepted as fact that moot had to top the board with a sticky thread specifically debunking the rumor, not that that stopped anyone from still claiming it to be true up until April Fools Day itself.
  • In 2017, several boards of differing ideals and concepts were merged due to "budget cuts", leading to such combos as /cock/, /fap/, and /mo/ ("Comics & Cartoons & Cooking", "Fashion & Photography", and "Mecha & Auto" respectively), telling those who browsed the merged boards to make friends with the users from the other board. While this DID work out well, it took /mlpol/ a good while to get along. And even then, there still was infighting going on.
  • In 2018, 4chan randomly assigned a Easter-candy-related team (Chocolate, Peep, Creme, Peanut Butter, and Mini) to users, since Easter Sunday happened to be on the same day as April's Fools day.
  • In 2019, 4chan allowed users to "like" posts, and implemented a point system where accumulating enough points (by posting, giving likes and receiving likes) allowed users to append emoji, dice rolls or randomly generated fortunes to their posts.
  • In 2022, any posts made on April 1 had a small chance to be signed with a randomly generated name and labelled with the message "powered by GPT-4chan" (along with Danbo's robot face), as if created by an AI.
• For 2013, the Fan Translation group Absolute Zero released an English translation patch for Tales of the Tempest - a game which most fans of the series consider to be complete shit (the readme even goes into detail about how terrible the game is).
• In 2010, Aeon Genesis finally released their translation of Tactics Ogre in Al Bhed.
• On April 1st, 2016, Albino Blacksheep appeared to post a sequel to The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny - except that it was actually a Screamer Prank.
• On podcast All Movie Talk, in the intro portion for the last Tuesday before April Fools' Day:
  • Sam told listeners that the episode contained the word "movie" more times than any other episode, and encouraged listeners to verify this (true or no, that's a lot of time to be counting the word "movie");
  • Stephen claimed to have gotten everyone a gift...only to reveal that it was a free movie podcast (just like every week);
  • Sam listed off the segments for the episode (which were false);
  • and finally, they introduced themselves as each other.
• Ambrosia Software released a free program called ScreenCleaner Pro, which claimed to be able to fix up monitors by brightening them; you opened the program, waited a few minutes while it "calibrated", and then the monitor would brighten significantly. Apparently a miracle product... except what it really did was gradually darken the screen, then turn it back to the original brightness. They even went so far as to get a fake positive review from a software site to make it look legitimate.
• SpongeBob SquarePants fan account The Art of SpongeBob rebranded as "The Art of Garfield" on April 1, 2024, and posted production lore about the orange cat instead of the yellow sponge.
• The Backloggery randomly added suffixes and prefixes to games' names (some of which were based on specific games themselves) as you refreshed the pages. This caused game lists to include such ridiculous titles as Imagine: Resident Evil 5, Superman 64 HD Remix, the redundant Street Fighter Alpha Anthology vs. Capcom, Tom Clancy's Sonic the Hedgehog, and Guitar Hero: Saya no Uta Edition.
• The Polish book website Biblionetka.pl holds a monthly community competition where someone posts several book excerpts based around a common theme, and the other users must guess what book each excerpt comes from. In April 2006, a contest was posted which challenged the users to guess 16 excerpts with the theme "Laughter". The answer? All the excerpts were from the same book, Milan Kundera's The Joke.
• Social media app Bluesky announced on April 1, 2024, that they were adding shorts. Not the short videos seen on YouTube or Instagram, but a pair of shorts with the logo on the butt.
• On April 1 2014, Brixton Buzz announced that Brixton was to be renamed East Clapham.
• In 2024, Pokémon wiki Bulbapedia had Larry instated as Editor-in-Chief. He promptly changed the entire website to black-and-white, as all the colours on the old site hurt his eyes.
• In 2017 the Castalia House blog posted a review of a (fictional) TV series named The Xeno Files, supposedly a forgotten and deliberately suppressed predecessor to V.
• Many of the people at Channel Awesome love to do at least one per year.
  • Linkara:
    • In 2009, he advertised that he'd review Watchmen on the show. Naturally, people would question his choice because his show was about reviewing bad comics and Watchmen was anything but, but in actuality the review was done in the style of Bum Reviews.
    • In 2011, Lewis put up three separate videos: a review of Titans #23 that was literally just Linkara saying that the comic sucked, a review of One More Day done by his teddy bear, and a review of a Power Rangers comic done in the style of The Irate Gamer.
    • In 2013, he uploaded a video titled "Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster," which first starts with Linkara stating he's going to review a novelty lamp he got at a store.^note This is a Call-Back to a mild running gag in To Boldly Flee, in which people forget what Linkara reviews and randomly assume that he reviews lamps. video then cuts out, and when it comes back we suddenly see Linkara imitating The Cinema Snob, and doing a review of the aforementioned movie. He also guest-starred on What the Fuck Is Wrong with You? and played along with Nash's joke.
    • In 2014, he uploaded an episode of Mobile Suit Gundam Abridged, but the Blip thumbnail and description have it labeled as a new History of Power Rangers update (as this series has become notorious for how long it takes for Linkara to update it, some videos even being uploaded an entire year apart) Made slightly more obvious in that the 'update' was for the Mighty Morphin movie, which he already established years ago he would not review.
    • In 2015, he released an episode of History of Power Rangers talking about the 2010 Recut of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It was a completely cynical review jokingly expressing his hatred of the show, which naturally is a complete 180 of Linkara's true opinion of Power Rangers.
    • In 2016, he uploaded a video supposedly being a crossover with the Cinema Snob to review a Power Rangers porn comic, but in reality the video was a parody of Welcome to Night Vale. What makes this bait-and-switch work is the comic in question appears in the pile of comics seen in almost every intro, but he never actually reviewed it yet.
    • In 2017, he posted what was supposedly a review of Power Rangers (2017) (which he'd already covered on Midnight Screenings), which instead turned out to be a serious analysis of The New 52 and its biggest failings, presented in the style of Jimquisition.
    • In 2018, he posted a new episode of Mobile Suit Gundabrigded, but it was copyright claimed by YouTube. An Adam Westing Lewis Lovhaug tried to figure out what to do next, and what followed was an episode filled with Continuity Porn of every previous April Fools video, appropriate for the celebration of the show's tenth anniversary.
    • In 2019, he decided it was time to revisit an old classic, and once again review the aformentioned lamp from 2013. Like before, the video suddenly cuts out and switches to a review of a movie called "Gallery of Horror," this time doing a parody in the style of Phelous.
    • In 2020, he presented a supposed review of the event comic Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Shattered Grid, but it was actually a "Cinemassacre Monster Madness" video talking about the WNUF Halloween Special.
    • In 2022, he released Winter of '83, an original Analog Horror series about the strange signals being picked up by a local TV station in Minnesota. The series is played entirely straight, even after the reveal that the menace terrorizing the town is a horde of evil snowmen.
    • 2024 had a third round at the Target $20 Lamp (complete with a CGI title card for said lamp review), but as before it cuts to a movie review as another reviewer, this time viewing The Murder Mansion in the style of Brandon's Cult Movie Reviews.
  • Doug Walker:
    • In 2009, Doug's three main characters switched series for an episode. The Nostalgia Critic had to answer questions meant for Ask That Guy, Ask That Guy had to do a review of Monsters vs. Aliens in style of Chester A. Bum, and Chester had to do a review of The NeverEnding Story (1984) instead of the Critic.
    • For 2014 instead of one of his usual Adventure Time vlogs, he instead uploads a vlog where he and Jason end up confusing the first episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic for an Adventure Time episode.
    • A new Nostalgia Critic review (on The Amazing Spider-Man 2) landed on April 1st in 2020, and began with a notice claiming the review had been cancelled. It then led into an ad for The Room on DVD before immediately cutting to TOM in a recreation of the 2012 Toonami comeback. This was also the first episode of 2020 done in Doug's home due to the coronavirus pandemic, so TOM also assures the viewers that despite the change of scene, Nostalgia Critic is going to continue, and the episode proceeds as normal.
  • Todd in the Shadows: In 2014, his "Float On" One Hit Wonderland video first seems like it's going to be about the Modest Mouse song, only to then instead be about a similarly named song by a '70s R&B group called "The Floaters."
  • Brad Jones: His 2014 joke was to upload a new video to the DVD-R Hell section of the site, making it look like he's going to review the infamous The Day the Clown Cried. Instead the video turned out to be a parody of Demo Reel, a web series by Doug Walker that suffered Magnum Opus Dissonance.
    • In 2010, he and Phelous reviewed Troll 4, a movie that doesn't exist.
  • That Dude in the Suede, in 2017, interrupted his weekly series Suede's Pokémon Journey to review an episode of Digimon Adventure - while still claiming to believe it was a Pokemon episode from the Kanto era, to the point of bashing it over off-model characters and nonsensical plot developments (such as Meowth (actually Gatomon) really being Misty's (Kari) Pokémon).
    • In 2020, he did the same thing, this time with a Dinosaur King episode.
• On April 1, 2012, instead of an Animorphs review, Cinnamon Bunzuh! surprised everyone by releasing a review for Stephenie Meyer's The Host (2008). Except when one actually clicks the review, it consists of nothing but an Andalite troll smiley (which bizarrely actually works) and a note:
  "This book is really long, and we are lazy. Sorry folks!"
• On April 1 2014, and for about two weeks afterwards, Coasterpedia (the Wikia one) had an article on the "River Phoenix," which was "a flair-loop coaster installed in the grounds of the Paris Hilton".^note "flair loop" is of course an anagram of "April fool"
• 2019 saw the wikia for Confession Executive Committee briefly turn into a wiki for LIP×LIP, one of the series' in-universe idol groups, playing off their Breakout Character status. Amusingly, this was before they were split off into the Idol Series.
• For 2014, instead of pranking their visitors, Cracked instead created an infographic containing "13 Shocking Statistics You Won't Believe Are True" for their readers to post on their Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter to see how many people will share them without first verifying how ridiculously false the facts are.
• On April 1, 2017, Danganronpa Wiki became Nagito Komaeda Wiki.
  • In 2018, it was rebranded to celebrate Dangan!™ the new "child friendly translation" by 4Kids, with Americanized Punny Names for the characters and the whole home page in Comic Sans.
  • In 2019, the site was "hacked" by Kokichi Oma.
  • in 2020 it was claimed that Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc was being ported to the Game Boy to celebrate the series' 10th anniversary, complete with a picture of a magazine article of the announcement.
  • In 2021, they announced a collaboration with McDonald's to release Danganronpa merch as part of Happy Meals, exclusively released in Japan and only on April 1st.
• Derpibooru:
  • The successor to Ponibooru got in on the act in 2013 by converting into Trixiebooru for April Fools' Day.
  • 2014 saw Derpibooru replace the background behind each image thumbnail with a randomized image of Nicolas Cage, as well as renaming the anonymous "Background Pony" title after him.
  • In 2015, the site was flooded with Desktop Ponies.
  • In 2016, the site added a watermark to every picture and added an option for a subscription page to pay to get rid of them (which also contained a "free trial" option to get rid of the watermarks until April Fools was over).
  • In 2017, Derpibooru announced a partnership with DeviantArt and reskinned the site to match.
  • In 2018, a user named after Starlight Glimmer started a thread on the forums that heavily criticized the site, saying it started off as an amazing place where everyone was equal, but had gone downhill in recent years due to the staff distancing themselves from the users. The user was generally dismissed as a troll, but two hours later, the site was reskinned with a communist theme. This reskin included changing the name to Glimmerbooru, turning the color scheme red, hiding the image scores, and replacing the upvote and downvote buttons with two equal signs (only one of which was clickable), among other things.
  • In 2019, the site not only turned into Electronic Arts as a lampoon on their current business practices (with standard site features needing to be unlocked with the virtual currency "D-Bux"), but also raised awareness of Article 13 being passed, threatening to delete everything ever uploaded en mass with the only countermeasure being having the user rely on their credit card numbers. Although obviously a joke in regards to the former, the latter was another story, especially considering the servers being in Europe.
  • 2020 saw Derpibooru getting "a brand new frontend" that made the site resemble crude HTML from the early days of the Internet, including gratuitous GIFs of fire and the Dancing Baby. The background for the site was even replaced with a crudely tiled version of the G1 My Little Pony logo.
  • 2021 saw the site become "Preenhub", with a logo parodying Pornhub. As part of the "new direction", the site encouraged everyone to upload fanart of characters preening.
  • In 2022, the site introduced an apparent NFT mechanic, where they'd mine "Derpthereum" to give the user proof that they now own the image. Except not really, according to a footnote.
  • In 2023, they sorted their users into two factions: the New Lunar Republic and the Solar Empire, and they competed to see who would get the most points by engaging with the community.
  • In 2024, the site added pixellated desktop ponies who would walk/fly across any artwork tagged with their character and make idle comments.
• DeviantArt has a tradition of doing things for April Fool's Day. The site's yearly shennanigans often involve an art prompt which, if users follow said prompt and post their art in the corresponding tag, will reward the user with an exclusive profile badge:
  • In 2008, the site replaced the avatars of all users with an animated gif of Mudkip with the words "So I herd you liek Mudkips" (sic), a reference to an internet meme. This led to many people being infuriated at the site's staff members for using such a meme when (at the time) they couldn't do memes as well. To make matters worse, it backfired in DeviantArt's faces because they also featured an artist user whose account name was along the lines of Mudkipz to go along with the gag.
    Unfortunately they didn't check out said deviant before featuring him, leading to many to click on his gallery and immediately find very suggestive loli pics (some of which were porn). They removed the featured deviant and chewed out the offensive imagery, but the damage was done and left many red-faced or shaking their heads in addition to the meme.
  • On April 1st 2010, avatars were changed to Team Edward, Team Jacob, Team Seeker, or Lady Gaga, with matching signatures (though the Team Seeker signatures reflect only Legend of the Seeker, and not Sword of Truth). Llama badges - the only badge which users could give each other for free - were also released. The llama badges immediately became a huge fad and were kept after the day ended, becoming a permanent feature of the site and even receiving mechandise.
  • For April 1st 2011 troll faces appeared on random places throughout the website (ironic, since the site has a very strict "No Trolling" policy).
  • In 2012, cats took over DA. Users who submitted art of their new feline overlords were awarded a badge.
  • In 2013, dA introduced deviantHEART, a dating service for Deviants.
  • In 2014, dA introduced thoughtArt, the new way to create and share art. It supposedly scans your cerebral and turns your thoughts into art. Except not.
  • In 2015, the site introduced the DeviantArt Stylus IRL, a way to bring the sophistication of digital art into the real world. Users who made art relating to this alleged new product received a badge.
  • In 2016, the site introduced the ArtStroke, which is a smartwatch-like fitness device that measures your strokes.
  • In 2017, the site made all of the featured posts be interpretations of the LOL WUT pear, and gave out a badge for submissions themed around it.
  • In 2018, the site unveiled "DeviantArt Originals", a Netflix-like service with art-related shows such as Bob RossDraws, 'Shopped, The OC, Les Adoptables, The Amazing Trace and Notorious RGB.
  • In 2019, the site introduced a software called Khush that enabled people to smell pictures on the website.
  • For 2020, they prompted users to draw a bizarre horselike character named Hoofs; users who did so received a badge in his likeness.
  • In 2021, they introduced ArtFortunes, a feature which allegedly used a powerful AI to analyze your art and use it to predict your future. Anyone who used the "feature" received a badge.
  • In 2022, they claimed the Mona Lisa was too boring, and prompted users to create their own "fixed" version of the painting. Users who did so received a badge.
  • In 2023, users were given the ability to give each other an exclusive badge called the "Totally Normal" badge. Allegedly, nothing strange will happen if you do this; in actuality, giving someone the badge causes their profile (and various other pages associated with them, such as art uploads) to use either Comic Sans or Papyrus as its font, seemingly depending on browser. After a few hours of this, most of the site used the unusual font due to most active users and a slew of inactive ones having the badge.
  • In 2024, DeviantArt announced that they were rebranding the site as DevianTart, and the site would be themed after baking, with deviations being referred to as "bakes" and artists being "bakers". Users could give each other an exclusive Whipped Cream badge.
• Digibutter.nerr:
  • The Defictionalized once claimed to be bought out by 4Kids. Every forum but the Party, Off Topic and RP forums were locked, and people took on parody alts that made fun of various characterizations and dubbing errors.
  • And a year later, they changed their name to the "Bitlands" (a spin-off site from it already exists) for April 1, 2010. Then it was revealed that there WILL be a name change and it MIGHT be the Bitlands anyways.
• Discord:
  • Chat service Discord released a notice about new "updates" on April 1, 2018. Among these were an @someone feature, which would notify a random user in the chat, and a promise to remove all the memes from the website (the latter made glaringly false by the fact that there was memetic language in the update notice itself.)
  • On April 1, 2019, Discord released an update which said simply, "We deleted Light Theme" (and indeed they did, although the theme was obviously brought back the next day.)
  • On April 1, 2024, Loot Boxes were added to the chat program. A trailer was made to go along with them, and the way they embedded the link to it in the client managed to make the video accidentally obtain 1.4 billion views in 24 hours.
• The animal news website The Dodo published in April Fools 2019 a fake video about a man's colossal, 450-pound dog.
• The Doom fansite Doomworld.com pulled a couple of pranks:
  • 2003: "Doomworld Nearing Its End", as a result of every single staff member leaving for one reason or another.
  • 2004: The site was supposedly now "sponsored by McDonald's", with the front page decorated with the Golden Arches logo and Ronald McDonald's likeness. Also, a news item was published, stating that Doom 3 has finally gone gold, though with a number of last-minute changes (e.g. all monsters looking like John Romero, and all levels being completely pitch black.)
  • 2006: Claiming that Action Doom 2, a sequel to the popular Doom mod, was in production. Except it turned out it wasn't a joke, as Action Doom 2 was surprisingly released out of the blue two years later.
  • 2007: Claiming that the site was shutting down because the doomworld.com domain had been sold to the Christian organization Endtime Ministries.
  • The Doomworld forums' monthly communal Game Mod playing event, "The DWmegawad Club", also got in on the act:
  • 2015: Supposedly featuring the controversial Brutal Doom mod.
  • 2016: Giving the thread a misleading title to fool people into thinking they'd be playing Memento Mori 3, which does not actually exist.
  • 2017: Featuring a mod which was supposedly the long-awaited episode 3 of Back to Saturn X, but instead was a "bootleg version" made up mostly of random rushedly-made maps and filled with cheesy MS Paint graphics.
  • 2018: The organizer renaming the club after himself, and demanding that all participants pay him groveling obeisance (all while choosing a mod to play that was already featured several years earlier).
• Dream Fiction Wiki: on April 1st, 2020, the wiki was renamed to the Dream Butter Wiki, some articles are also changed, but were reverted due to Vandalism.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan Twitter account Emergency Pony would switch from posting screenshots of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic to posting screenshots of other related properties on April 1.
  • In 2016, 2017, and 2018, it posted pictures from the various other My Little Pony cartoons, captioned with mangled versions of Friendship is Magic episode titles, such as "Rarity Leaves Manehattan", "The Best Pet Wins in May!", and "The Gang Knows Pinkie Pie."
  • In 2019, it posted screenshots from another pony cartoon, Filly Funtasia.
  • In 2020, it posted screenshots of the My Little Pony: Pony Life Stop Motion films.
  • In 2021, it posted screenshots of the Pony Life 2D animated series. However, the account began legitimately integrating Pony Life screenshots into the feed shortly afterwards.
  • In 2022, it posted screenshots from Centaurworld.
  • In 2023, it became Emergency Bluey.
• Equestria Daily:
  • 2011: Trixie taking over the site. This more than anything was what really instilled in the fandom that Sethisto really likes Trixie.
  • 2012: Converting the website from Generation 4 (Friendship Is Magic) to Generations 1-3.5 (the original My Little Pony to the sugary, oddly bulbous-bodied characters from the series immediately before FiM). Their reasoning was that they were under a Hasbro takeover.
  • 2013: they decided to "monitor everything", presenting "ponified" news stories as well as a few fake "updates" about season 4.
  • 2014: they set themselves to 2045, and looked back at all 31 seasons of Friendship Is Magic.
  • 2015: the site took a more manly approach to some of its articles and renamed itself "Man Daily". By featuring Bulk Biceps on the banner, of course.
  • 2016: the site became Equality Inquirer, dedicated to the Ensemble Dark Horse villain of season 5. The app was also changed: the background became red and the font was changed to Comic Sans.
  • 2017: "Sauce n Pony Daily", which takes the previously posted saucy art compilations and takes it to its most logical conclusion: actual sauces.
  • 2018: The cryptocurrency "Ponecoin" was announced, similar to the 2018 Tumblr example below.
  • 2019: Announced Gen 5, a sci-fi show called "Space Mares". Proceeded to overanalyze the show just as they did with Gen 4.
  • 2020: Averted, due to the chaos of the first few months of 2020. Instead, they simply went with Brony Appreciation Day, a day dedicated to the fanbase.
  • 2021: Rebranded to "The Izzy Experience," declaring a focus on the then-newly-announced Generation 5 pony Izzy Moonbow at the expense of most other characters.
  • 2022: Rebranded to "Bats & Kirin" to exclusively focus on batponies and kirin at the expense of other species, even ponies.
  • 2023: Announced that they had been bought by a company called Canterlex, who planned to monetize the site via comically expensive premium features. These features include things such as a buggy AI intended to generate "the perfect pony" which has a tendency to do other things instead, content submitted by paying users being prioritized, all paying users' comments starting with 100 upvotes, and all paying users seeing less typos while free users see more.
  • 2024: Announced the site would now center around the OpenPony mod on Second Life.
• Fimfiction.net: Used to feature annual April Fools jokes, but because all pranks ended up being taken seriously by the site's users, they were permanently cancelled after 2015.
  • 2013:
    • knighty announced he was stepping down as admin and lead developer of the site, to be replaced by Poultron.
    • New admin and lead developer Poultron announced he was banning all new Human-in-Equestria stories and moving all currently-published HiE stories elsewhere.
  • 2014:
    • Some of the stories on the site appeared as if they were written by someone else. And this applied to any and all stories by that author, even stories that had been posted years before that date and that were clearly not by that author.
    • The administrator, knighty, changed his name and avatar to that of Mark Zuckerburg and claimed Facebook owned the site, making fun of Facebook buying the Oculus Rift.
  • 2015:
    • The announcement post detailing the changes staff did to the featured box was posted on March 31st, 2015 to try to avoid this. However, the day after April Fools, a blog post has been added that clearly states on bold that the feature box has not been changed and that that was a increasingly large prank.
    • The popular Seattle's Angels review group posted several fake stories that link to various things outside of Fimfiction (the cover art for one of these was just the cover art of Past Sins with the colours inverted) with even crazier reviews.
    • The administrator posted a blog post (this one more subtle, with several letters in italic that spell April Fools) banning LoHAV stories on the site^note For those that are unaware, this stands for "League of Humans Acting Villainous" and is increasingly popular on the site. The basic premise is this: a person goes to a convention (almost always Comic-Con) cosplaying as their favourite fictional villain. They find a tricket by a merchant that is just what they need to finish their costume. They then find themselves in Equestria with all the powers of the villain they were cosplaying. Hilarity Ensues.
• The official forums for Final Fantasy XIV goes through some minor changes to avatars used by everyone:
  • 2014 changed everyone's avatar into the one used by the game director, Yoshida.
  • 2015 used Hildibrand, Godbert, Julyan, Nashu, and Briardien for everyone's avatars, which were characters that appeared in the Denser and Wackier side quests in the game.
  • 2016 had everyone's avatars changed into plot important NPCs that appeared in the Heavensward scenario, which include characters like Thordon, Lucia, Aymeric, Estinien, Ysayle, and others.
  • 2018 changed the avatars to the Namazu, which are a race of talking catfish.
• Furry art site Fur Affinity has its share of pranks. For a few years, the search engine was taken down and one year, it was put back up for that day, but people got fooled when they saw that it didn't work at all. One common joke its members play on its watchers is to use a thumbnail (preview) of a piece of art they claimed to have made and when people click it, the art is something different (example: a thumbnail promises fat fur art and instead, users get an anorexic fur). Usually most members that are aware of the jokes and what the artists usually make usually won't fall for it. Another common joke is an artist making a journal claiming they are going to leave the site forever.
• The science news website Futurism published articles on April 1, 2017 that claimed Pluto was reclassified as a planet and the LHC was irreperably damaged.
• GameFAQs always gets in on the April Fools Day craze. In later years it's been toned down, sometimes with the only gag being a silly Poll of the Day and maybe the creation of a few joke message boards. But in the past, they've done some huge things, including:
  • Banning the latter "e"
  • Changing the entire layout to create GameFAX, a site all about the Xbox
  • Promoting random users to moderator status (though obviously not giving them actual power)
  • Putting up a fake notice on the homepage about the site being shut down for illegal activities
  • Removing all usernames in an effort to stop harassment
• Google almost always has a yearly joke to pull, ranging from lunar research bases to intelligence-boosting energy drinks.
  • In 2010, Google put up a link to a new "Google Animal Translate" feature, and changed its name to Topeka.com in response to the city changing its name to Google, Kansas. Details here.
  • In 2012, they created Google Maps 8-bit for the NES. The video itself shows its work by showing that it is for the Famicom, which had networking features the Nintendo Entertainment System didn't.
  • In 2013, Google announced the release of Google Nose and Gmail Blue.
  • In 2014, Google introduced the Google Maps Pokémon Challenge free for anyone who owns an iPhone or an Android with the Google Maps application. Simply tap the search bar then press the Press Start button, handily labeled with a Pokéball. The map shifts to the closest Pokémon Center, showing any and all available Pokémon nearby. Catch them all, and you'll win a chance to get a job at Google. (Pokémon GO, which features a similar concept, wouldn't be unveiled until the following year.)
  • For 2015, Google introduced a new mode for Google Maps that turns any location that has enough roads into a game of Pac-Man. This has been up for a few days before April Fools, though. This was done again in 2017, but with Ms. Pac-Man instead.
  • For 2016, Google added a feature to Gmail which allowed you to do a Mic Drop on a conversation, courtesy of a GIF of a scene from the film Minions where Bob does just that during his coronation. Since the button that does this was in the same place as the "Send and Archive" button, it ended badly and the button had to be removed.
  • 2017 gives us the Google Gnome, which is the Google Home (Google's smart home platform) but for your backyard. A lot of people invested in the Google ecosystem are disappointed this isn't an actual thing.
  • 2018 let us look for Waldo on Google Maps for the first week of April.
  • 2019 introduced another Google Maps game, this time a train-themed version of Snake, with different versions based on different cities, including Cairo, London, and Sydney.
  • All planned jokes for 2020s were canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic & in the case of 2022, the Ukrainian invasion.
  • Google's Japanese Input team has announced a silly input method every year, including a Morse Code keyboard, a split-flap display with a single button, a party blower-based input device, a keyboard-based on a drum set, and a Spoon Bending version.
• In 2012, Grooveshark (a music streaming website) introduced a new feature where Hipster Otis and Hipster Jen pop up to offer inane commentary on any song you play.
• Hardcore Gaming 101 added Final Fantasy VI to "Your Weekly Kusoge," its almost-weekly column dedicated to kusoge (crappy games) on April 1st, 2015. It was an article telling the readers how much it sucked and wondering how could it ever become a success. Despite being clearly a joke, having several imprecisions, and being written in a different way from the usual detailed and formal manner, several readers were angered. The article is still up but clearly labeled as an April Fool's joke.
• On April 1 2014, the Harry Potter Wiki became the "Lord Voldemort Wiki".
• I-Mockery releases joke games on April Fools. In 2008, it was a Pickleman (the site's mascot/creator's alter-ego) game, which was really just E.T. with Pickleman coming after you and killing you. For 2009, it's Tetris for Charity, where if you get to the 3rd level, $1 is donated to charity. Halfway through the second level, all the blocks are replaced by random NES sprites, which makes the game impossible. For 2010, it's Pitfall! 2010, which looks like the original at first glance, but depending on the path you take on the first screen, you'll be killed by either the Guts Dozer from Mega Man 2, the robot ape from Strider, or Sinistar.
• In 2016, live-streaming website iVlog scrambled people's usernames and censored certain words in amusing ways. Of course, the Scunthorpe Problem was in effect, possibly intentionally (Scunthorpe itself became Scabbagehorpe).
• JayIsGames.com created their own Spot the Difference game that leads into an impossible level. The walkthrough included claims that this was a turning point that leads the game into becoming a Deconstruction Game, but in truth, nothing happens at all if you wait, not even a Screamer Prank.
  • In 2011, they reviewed a tic-tac-toe game far too seriously.
  • In 2007 they reviewed a supposedly massive browser game that was actually just a loading screen that never ended. After April Fool's they turned it into an actual review of the downloadable game it was based on.
  • In 2009, they had an overblown review of a game called "Quest for the Crown".
  • In 2012, they created a genuine, playable Text Adventure game, the joke being its completely ridiculous premise. Jay Is Ponies!
  • In 2014, they found a site that makes versions of the online game 2048 and made a version with the faces of the staff replacing the numbers: Jayis2048.
• Know Your Meme:
  • On April 1st 2012, you could "buy" memes. Supposedly with real money, but the next day both orders and bills were canceled
  • On April 1st, 2013, the site claimed that the main tubular system was down and that the database could only process memes that predated the Internet. All confirmed memes were still available under a separate "Deadpooled" section.
  • On April 1st, 2014, users could vote to "retire" old memes through the Internet Meme Retirement Program. At the end of the day, 30 pages were deemed "retired".
  • On April 1st, 2015, the Cringeworthy Gallery was reopened (but anyone who posted in it was given a 24-hour "ban" as part of the joke), entries for Don and Super Robo Jesus were confirmed, and the entry for the controversy that shall not be named was Deadpooled claiming that the SJWs have sued the website. Also, the cursor was replaced with the Illuminati All-Seeing Eye triangle and all usernames and profile pictures were replaced by variations on Don.
  • April 1 2016 featured "Elect Your Meme" in which users voted on which memetic person/article to elect the first ever Meme President of the Unitinu (the winner was Moon Man, a racist version of McDonald's mascot Mac Tonight), and the popular but locked-down Cringeworthy page was renamed to "Our KYM Safe Space", where people were encouraged to role-play PC-obsessed angsty teenagers with a victim complex in the comments. An entry moderator also began uploading articles like those usually churned out by people attempting to "create" memes or generally not putting any effort into them.
  • In 2017, KYM released the Meme Exchange, a stock exchange of memes where users could purchase and sell stock in memes with KYM Coins.
  • In 2018, they launched Project MemeX, which was a mission to preserve memes by launching a satellite hosting an advanced memory storage of memes into orbit.
  • In 2020, the site became "Know Your Pickle", in which the entire site was retooled to be a giant homage to Pickle Rick Shitposting.
  • In 2021, the website featured a throwback to 2012-era memes, justified by claiming the users had woken up from a nine-year coma.
  • In 2023, they rebranded themselves as "Know Your Mom", a site focusing on mom-related memes.
• In 2012, LoadingReadyRun announced that they would be renaming their site to "CatingCattyCats" to produce exclusively cat-related content for a Chinese company as part of a corporate takeover.
  "They offered us just a shitton of cash," said Graham Stark, President and co-founder of LoadingReadyRun Megacorp Inc. "Like, you think you can imagine a shitton of cash, but you really, really can't. We're very excited to work with MauBau, the market leader of cat-focused entertainment content, to create great new entertainment properties. Also to get their money. Of which there is a shitton."
• The Mickey Mindset^note a spinoff of the Muppet Mindset listed below almost never does this, but they had two articles for April Fools 2015: a potential live-action remake of A Goofy Movie (a Take That! at Disney's influx of live-action remakes of their classic works, such as Cinderella (2015) and Alice in Wonderland (2010)) and Marvel's announcement of a Squirrel Girl/Howard The Duck crossover movie. The previous year, they renamed themselves "The American Mindset" for the day and posted an article about their favorite patriotic Disney moments.
• MuggleNet posts absurd news items on April 1st, such as claiming Scholastic would rerelease the books with titles like "Harry Potter and A Super Cool Stone", "Harry Potter and A Super SUPER Secret", "Harry Potter and A Bad Guy Who's Actually Okay", "Harry Potter and FIREEEEEEEEE!", "Harry Potter and A Super Secret House shhh", "Harry Potter and A Prince, Like The One You Know", and "Harry Potter and A Good Versus Evil Fight". One year they joined forces with The Leaky Cauldron by claiming that the two webmasters Emerson and Melissa (who were already being shipped as "Memerson") had gotten married and were combining sites.
• Muppet fan website The Muppet Mindset has had many April Fools jokes besides the website swap with ToughPigs (which they would eventually merge with) mentioned below.
  • In 2010 they were hit with a fake cease and desist.
  • In 2012, they put up an article involving a fake ride at Disney Theme Parks based around Angus McGonagle (a one-off character from the Star Wars episode of The Muppet Show)
  • In 2014 for Muppets Most Wanted, the site was temporarily rebranded the Constantine Mindset.
  • For 2015, they announced dozens of Spin-Off websites, from the logical (the Marvel Mindset and the Mario Mindset) to the ridiculous (er... the Macaroni Mindset?). It reached its epix when they announced "The Mindset Mindset", a blog for fans of all of the Mindset sites. Each post linked to the same picture of Fozzie (a screencap from the Bohemian Rhapsody viral video) with the caption "April Fools!"
  • 2016 had the site sponsored by Coca-Cola.
  • In 2017 the site rebranded as the Muffin Mindset, complete with a review of The Muffin Movie.
  • In 2018, they announced that the then-new Muppet Babies (2018) was cancelled... not even a month after its official premiere.
  • In 2019, they announced that Disney+ would air The Muppet Show Again, a revival of the original Muppet Show, instead of whatever Muppet series they had in development (Muppets Now was later announced for the following year). It was to feature all the sketches from the original series, such as "Pigs In Space Again", "Veterinarian's Hospital Again", "UK Spot Again"^note The "UK Spot" is an extra song or skit created to fill broadcast time in the United Kingdom, as that country has shorter commercial breaks. These were not shown during most broadcasts in North America, but are included on home media releases of The Muppet Show episodes. A UK Spot would not be necessary if there was a new Muppet Show for a streaming service, as there are no outside commercials., etc., and perhaps tipping you off to the fact that it's a joke, every Muppet performer named in the press release had "(Phil Philips in the Academy Award winning The Happytime Murders)" after their names. This seems to be a subtle Take That! at people who believe the Muppets should just do all the things that put them on the map again and again^note for instance, the majority of Muppet appearances since Steve Whitmire's removal have Kermit singing "Rainbow Connection" and not make any bold new entries in the franchise (such as the 2015 The Muppets series).
• The Music Database Encyclopedia Metallum has a tradition of pulling these every year since 2009, only having not participated once - in 2011.
  • The first prank saw the site accept the nu-metal band KoRn into it's database, after the mods deemed the band's first album to be "metal enough".
  • 2010 saw the removal of the site's forum, the Tavern, for a day.
  • In 2012, the site posted an FBI logo on it's main page, suggesting that it had been taken down due to promoting internet piracy. Despite the fact that you simply had to click just to get to the main page, many people feared the site had suffered the same fate as MegaUpload.
  • 2013 saw the addition of Nickelback to the site, in the same vein as the addition of Korn. It was accompanied by several reviews praising the band's albums, as well as numerous vandalisms of the band's page (for example: It was stated that Hellblazer, one of MA's founders, was actually Chad Kroeger). The satire site Tyranny of Tradition expanded upon this by running a fake article having Nickelback supposedly hold a press conference in response to the site.
  • 2014 had 2 pranks:
    • The first being the vandalism of the page for a Chilean Black Metal band named Hades Archer, having their genre of music changed to "Penis Metal".
    • A secondary prank involved the deletion of the page for the controversial band Meshuggah (whose genre was listed as "Technical Nu-Metal/Djent"), as well as several staged arguments between the moderators.
• Neopets has done this for over 10 years:
  • 2000: A page filled with pets that didn't quite make the cut. (The artists were having a bad day.)
  • 2001: An announcement that some of the pets would be redesigned.
  • 2002: The Pant Devil stole everyone's items, including ones in their Safety Deposit Boxes.
  • 2003: A sneak preview of the site's Totally Radical makeover, Neopetz.
  • 2004: A new TCG expansion pack, "Quiguki Armageddon". It featured a parody of their Usuki toys, called Quigukis (based on the frog-like Quiggles). The Quigukis underwent Defictionalization, everything else did not.
  • 2005: 50 new Neopets, with the announcement that the maximum number of pets an account could have was now 10 (instead of 4). A poll was held, and the most popular (the Lamameeah) was released as an actual Neopet (the Gnorbu), while a few others were released as Petpets.
  • 2006: To stabilize the Neopian economy, NeoCharge was introduced, which taxed users for each page they visited. Failure to pay debts would supposedly result in accounts being flagged, and actions being taken to "compensate" ^note Losing items, pets being put up for adoption or returned to a basic color, restricted access to the site, more ads, etc..
  • 2007: The Battledome was closed, as well as the Battledome section of the forums, and any weapon shop.
  • 2008: The NeoBuddy system was introduced, where a questionnaire would match you up with a buddy (Bug Eye McGee for most, Sir Fufon Lui for a few), who would pop up from time to time and give advice.
  • 2009: It was announced that the pets would be phased out in favor of Neoplants, and there were minor jokes around the site as well:
    • The Hidden Tower was closed until further notice, as was the Faerieland Employment Agency.
    • The Tiki Tack Tomobola was perpetually out of money, and kept asking for a 1 NP donation.
    • Neopoint inflation rose tenfold, and interest rates at the Bank were lowered (the Banker got a new appearance, as well).
    • The Stock Market was stuck; no prices moved up or down.
  • 2010: More minor jokes:
    • The Battledome: In 3D! [1] [2] [3]
    • The Prank Warehouse opened up, which allowed users to send various pranks (such as pies or slime) to their friends.
    • Neoboard filters were added— for instance, "3.14" would be changed to "numbers", "snot" would be filtered into "faerie dust", and "slime" would be changed into "Twilight"
    • They also snuck one into their Facebook page, with some concept art— of the "Meat Faerie".
• The various wikis in the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance are fond of doing things like this:
  • Super Mario Wiki: Every year at the top of April, the wiki decides to have a little fun. The main page variations and original pages made for these jokes are typically archived in the "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense" portal.
    • The Did You Know? sections of the front page (except in 2020) all featured strange, but true, facts about the Mario universe out of context.
    • In 2013, the wiki put up an article about a Darker and Edgier FPS reboot of the series, titled simply "Mario". As over-the-top as it was, it apparently managed to fool several users.
    • In 2014, two Waluigi-centric games were announced; a fitness game entitled Waluigi to Fitness, and a Luigi's Mansion-esque game named Waluigi's Warehouse.
    • In 2015, a book about a Darker and Edgier backstory of the Donkey Kong Country series was announced. The wiki also featured a line from the infamous Gaming in the Clinton Years review of Donkey Kong Country:
      Donkey Kong Country is truly perfect. If you do not get this amazing new generation of Donkey Kong madness, you are stupid. Yes, we know it's insulting, but that's also the truth. If you're a true video game fan, you will not hesitate in the slightest bit to buy this piece of gaming history.
    • In 2016, the wiki announced the Nintendo Cinematic Universe, a movie franchise that contains the film Mario. Additionally, Pikmin's Pikipedia announced a movie named Pik-Min and SmashWiki announced The Smashers.^note The movie plots were basically rehashes of Thor, Ant-Man and The Avengers with different characters
    • In 2017, the wiki rebranded as the Crash Bandicoot Wiki, as NIWA turned into SIWA (Sony Independent Wiki Alliance).
    • In 2018, the wiki was normal as usual, but added a "New Funky Mode" banner on the top right corner. Clicking on it links to a Funky Kong version.
    • In 2019, the site was turned into a fan wiki for Pink Donkey Kong Jr. (otherwise known as Junior II), an obscure character from Donkey Kong Junior Math. Mario Lore with Shigeru Miyamoto is announced.
    • In 2020, the wiki moved to a paid subscription service requiring $10 a month to read, with the subscription also introducing badges that can be bought, including a Cappy badge that lets you control someone else's account and a Noshi badge that randomly adds Noshi pics to 25% of the wiki's pages.
    • In 2021, the wiki removed all mentions of Mario except for a poll on the main page asking who should take Mario's place after his "unexpected passing", in acknowledgement of the "Mario dies on March 31st" meme that arose from Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Super Mario Bros. 35 being taken down on March 31st. The logo became a green mushroom that just read "Super Wiki", and the news section reported that Super Luigi Galaxy 3 was announced.
    • In 2022, they claimed that they received some secret details regarding the film, with the plot parodying cliche animated films.
    • In 2023, the Super Mario Wiki rethemed itself to be about real people named Mario, instead of just the Nintendo series.
    • In 2024, the featured article was Mushroom Kingdom Hearts, a fictious crossover with Kingdom Hearts based on an April Fools' Day joke made by Electronic Gaming Monthly in 2007.
  • SmashWiki featured fake Smash Bros. news in 2014, and in 2015 changed their name to SmashRiki.
  • The Donkey Kong Wiki changed their name to Lanky Kong Wiki in 2015.
  • In 2014 and 2015, the Animal Crossing Wiki had a banner claiming the wiki would be shutting down, with a link to their article on April Fools' Day.
  • For 2022, all Nookipedia articles had a banner above them claiming that the site was becoming Cephalopedia, due to having been taken over by "our robotic overlord Cephalobot".
  • For April 1, 2019, Zelda Wiki became Tingle Wiki, with the titles and main page thumbnails of all games in the series edited to star Tingle. The banner at the top of the wiki claimed that four new Tingle games had been announced.
  • In 2023, Inkipedia, the Splatoon wiki, flipped its logo upside down and became Inkepidea, the Sploteen wiki. In 2024, it was taken over by Grizzco and became Grizzipedia.
• In 2015, Not Always Right made all of their stories about a fictional Zombie Apocalypse. This was also used on their sister sites, including Not Always Working. They followed it up in 2016 by making all the posts about Star Wars.
• On April 1, 2014, NPR's website ran an article titled "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?", an example of a prank meant to prove a point. The comments section is filled with people who, uh, proved NPR's point.
• The blog of the company OpenAI published a post announcing an AI doing "Spam detection in the physical world"... and by Spam, they mean literal cans of Spam.
• Parents and Kids Share Together, a Sprout fansite from Autistic fan Madeline Fretz, announced Apple TV+ and NBCUniversal would work together and revive the Sprout brand in 2022.
• thepiratebay.se:
  • On April 1st, 2013, the website posted a blog post informing that their servers have been changed from North Korea to the United States and that all torrents from North Korea, China, Iran, France and Islamistan would be removed.
  • On April 1st 2014, the site introduced "The Virtual Bay", where "you'll be able to see, hear and feel everything that is a part of The Pirate Bay."
• Ponibooru (a Danbooru-like image website for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic) became overrun by Pinkie Pies during April Fools' 2012.
• PornHub:
  • In 2016, they rebranded as "CornHub" and filled the site with corn-related videos (with titles full of Double Entendre).
  • In 2017, they trolled their users by pretending to introduce automatic video sharing to users' social media accounts. Some people got a good scare out of that one.
  • Like the 2016 example, in 2018 they turned into "HornHub" and featured a bunch of horn-related videos.
• Reddit:
  • In April 1st, 2013, the site blog stated that Reddit has bought Team Fortress 2. The TF2 blog, however, stated that Team Fortress 2 has secretly bought Reddit instead.
  • With the taking over of Team Fortress 2/Reddit, Reddit hosted a voting competition between Orangered and Periwinkle,(Read: Red and Blue) and whoever got the most hats, another addition of the site, won. If you care, then Orangered won.
  • In 2013 the Subreddits for Star Wars and Star Trek switched backgrounds for the day. Two years later, Homestuck and Steven Universe did the same thing. Both left a lot of fans scratching their heads.
  • In 2019, the subreddit The_Donald (dedicated to fanboying over Donald Trump) replaced its banner with the CNN logo, and regulars spent most of the day posting threads about how much they love CNN and hate Trump.
  • In 2023, the Undertale subreddit pretended that the game was newly released on September 15, 2015, with its users acting like it was their first time playing it. The Polandball subreddit also required all its users to make their comics with traditional art to "combat AI art".
  • The subreddit for Scott The Woz celebrates April Fool's Day annually.
    • In 2023, they banned any posts that contained the letter "L," playing off the meme about Scott making an "L button" video.
    Moderator: We are an R button subreddit.
    • In 2024, they turned into a subreddit for Nathaniel Bandy, another gaming YouTuber.
  • The Danganronpa subreddit has pulled a few jokes:
    • In 2017, everybody's flairs were replaced with underwear of all of the characters.
    • In 2021, a swap was orchestrated with the Five Nights at Freddy's subreddit, complete with changing the flairs.
• Romhack website Romhacking.net put up a link on April 1, 2014 for a translation of Etrian Odyssey Retold, a supposed "hard version" of Etrian Odyssey. It was actually a full translation for the game 7th Dragon.
• Pokemon fan account "Out of Context Pokemon" became a Digimon account for the duration of April 1, 2024.
• The Rule 34 porn site once enacted an April Fool's joke resulting in the ban of all lolicon/shota artwork from the site. What makes this particularly nasty is the joke was cooked up in response to e-hentai's ACTUAL ban of all underaged artwork due to Moral Guardian antagonization of their advertisers, and used the subpoena sent to them as the excuse, doctored up to look like it was sent to said pornsite instead. The joke was meant to be incredibly obvious, as the featured image was Rugrats (with, at one point, a feature change to Popeye dressed as Sailor Moon in response to an anonymous commenter along with the comment 'But older characters cosplaying as underaged? Yes that's still acceptable.'), however due to the e-hentai debacle, users just couldn't believe it was a joke and some serious debate went down over the state of the world and continuing persecution of lolicons. Some artists even ragequit over what they took to be impending censorship of their art on a site that shouldn't have it. All staff were told to keep up appearances for a day after, duplicate pics that were to be deleted were saved up for about a week prior, then commented upon before being deleted to lend to the authenticity. A few artists still haven't returned, and probably never will. And then to top it off, e-hentai unbanned underaged artwork, instead placing it on the spin-off site exhentai.
• ScoobyDooMistakes:
  • In 2016, it was announced that the site will be revamped into ScoobyDooAccuracies, deemphasizing the off-model moments that the blog is normally fixiated on in favor of praising what the artists got right to absurd lengths.
  • 2017: Introducing ScoobyPhotoDooMisC4Takes, a combination of the regular content and Colin's photo blog.
  • In 2018, the site decided to spend the day playing up Scrappy Doo as an underappreciated character. Hence, ScrappyDooAppreciations.
  • 2019 brought us SalvatoreDooMistakes, in which Colin lets his pet cat have a turn at commentating on the Scooby-Doo bloopers.
  • For 2020, Colin's recurring fictional animator characters Carl and Ted riff on the educational short "Why Take Chances".
  • 2021 saw Colin looking at 1970s Hardee's commercials, claiming he's trying to sell out. The last post in the series ended up being published the following day.
  • For 2022, the site rebranded as "AI-DooMistakes" and commentated on a bizarre AI-generated Scooby-Doo script.
  • 2023 had... nothing.
  • In 2024, Colin decided that the animation quirks in Scooby's cartoons did not measure up to the quirks of a Great Dane he had adopted, and announced the blog is shutting down.
• In 2017, movie site Screen Rant ran an article about Lucasfilm announcing a sequel to Rogue One, with Felicity Jones set to return... which was quite questionable, considering that pretty much every character not Saved by Canon (including Felicity's) ended up dead by the end of the movie.
• The Slate Star Codex blog in 2017 published a supposed "previously undiscovered manuscript" written by G. K. Chesterton, on the topic of artificial intelligence.
• Smashboards:
  • The Super Smash Bros. fan forum converted itself into Emblemboards for April 1st, 2016, as a joke on the amount of Fire Emblem characters in the fourth game (six, counting DLC characters Roy and Corrin). This included displaying usernames in a name tag box from Fire Emblem Fates and replacing everyone's avatar with a random Fire Emblem character.
  • In 2017, "& Knuckles" was appended to everyone's username, and their avatars were switched to a random image of Knuckles the Echidna.
  • In 2018, the site became Ridleyboards, switching everyone's avatar to a random image of the Metroid villain.
• Spotify:
  • In 2019, they replaced the "Discover Weekly" feature, a randomized playlist of reccomended songs based on the user's streaming history, with "Discocover Weekly", a playlist of disco covers... As in both cover songs In the Style of disco and non-disco covers of disco songs.
  • In 2023, with their "DJ" option now public, the service, in between regular music, would play you Gregorian liturgical music.
• For April Fool's Day 2018, Steven Universe Wiki became sans undertale wiki, using all lowercase letters like Sans from Undertale does and having constant misspellings.
• The B-movie review site Stomp Tokyo reviewed nonexistent movies on 1 April. The first of these was The Dellon Godhead, a Doctor Who / The New Avengers crossover, supposedly including BRIAN BLESSED as a football-obsessed Blackbeard.
• SydLexia.com posted the 100 Best Virtual Boy Games Ever. (Only 22 games were ever released for the Virtual Boy across the US and Japan.) Virtual Boy Wario Land was the only game listed, and in all 100 spots too, no exceptions. Reading the commentaries, they seem to claim that there are many versions of Virtual Boy Wario Land, even versions for different consoles, all with the same title. Some of the comments were ripped directly from the prior Top 100 lists Syd had made. There were even surprise comments from Jareth The Goblin King and Avril Lavigne.
• Tales of MU posted an update in 2009, announcing production plans for a Syfy channel spin-off TV show, of which the author claimed pride but apparently had little creative control, resulting in significant deviations from the core themes of the novel. It linked to the writer's Livejournal crossposting, where comments revealed the prank. A few commenters disbelieved the announcement because it referenced "the newly branded Syfy channel" at the end, and were double-pranked to discover Sci Fi's renaming on April 1st, though it was widely known earlier.
• TASVideos gets many joke run submissions during April Fools' Day. Sometimes the joke is the game, as in the submissions for Color a Dinosaur or Desert Bus. Sometimes the run is the joke, as in the The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess run that would crash the game and make it load another emulator from the emulated console's SD card (meaning that the game the run beats isn't even Twilight Princess, but rather Kirby's Avalanche).
  • One infamous April Fools' Day joke was half-serious: they actually had discovered that emulators can never properly replicate certain forms of randomness used by the actual hardware, but they didn't really intend to shut down the whole site over it.
    • Ironically, since then, emulator runs have actually been proven to run on console, depending on the game.
  • The site itself also does April Fools' jokes, such as in 2014 when they announced TASVideos Pro, "a place where only the most professional TASers contribute the truly best runs" with exclusive tools and resources, available for only $25 USD a month.
• Like with the actual game, the Team Fortress 2 official wiki has been doing April Fools' Day pranks since 2011, as seen here.
  • On April 1st, 2011, the Team Fortress Wiki altered the front page as part of a fictional Australium April Update. The "featured article" rotated between the pages for the new class, the Demopan, and the new Cow melee weapon for the Heavy. The Demopan page was originally created by Benjamuffin for his user page, while the Cow page was created specifically for April Fools' Day by Focusknock. The trending topics were changed to Cow, Demopan, Frying Pan, Bounty Hat, Chargin' Targe, Dangeresque, Too?, Stout Shako, and For 2 Refined (which links to the Trading page) for the day. A fake update post, written by Stevoisiak, was added to the current events describing the fake update.
  • For April Fools' Day 2012, a fake patch article was released announcing the release of Ricochet 2, along with the addition of the following items: the Circular Circlesaw, the Crocketeer's Cloak, the Ricochest, and the Heartwarming Headache. Apparently, this joke was so good, some people thought Valve was behind it, even though Valve was not involved in any way in this update; everything has been thought of and created by Wiki editors. More info can be found here.
    • What's interesting about this April Fools' Day prank (which may or may not be coincidental and/or foreshadowing) is that it promised "native client support for Linux", which did eventually get added to the game (at least on Ubuntu).
• Theater news site TheaterMania:
  • On April 1, 2022, announced a revival of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark starring Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire, and Tom Holland (the three actors for Peter Parker in the three major Spider-Man cinematic franchises) interchangeably as Peter Parker, directed by Ivo van Hove.
  • In 2024, they "announced" a Broadway transfer for the memetic Willy's Chocolate Experience, complete with a new tragic backstory for the Unknown. It was said to premiere at the closed 42nd Street McDonald's.
• ToughPigs, a fansite of The Muppets, has done this almost every year since 2008.
  • In 2008, they temporarily converted to a Topo Gigio fansite.
  • In 2009, their joke was a bit more "negative" than the previous year.
  • In 2010, when The Muppets was still in its preproduction stage, they posted a newsbit about the movie actually being a remake of their first film. They Changed It, Now It Sucks! reactions ensued.
  • In 2012, the site renamed itself ToughBears and posted a total of seven fake articles relating to Muppet bears, such as an app of Flo Bear from Sesame Street (which is said to consist of a looping animation of Flo writing a book), Bobo starring in a Judd Apatow film, and a countdown of the top 100 Emily Bear moments (of which there are only three listed; the article teased that the other 97 would come soon).
  • In 2013, they switched duties with fellow Muppet fansite The Muppet Mindset. ToughPigs proved to be more active in that regard, with spoofs of all of the Mindset's regular articles such as "Weekly Muppet Wednesdays", "The Great Muppet Survey" and "Muppet Fan's Muppet Collection Chronicle". Meanwhile, the Mindset went with the "Beautiful Toy Pageant" (a spoof of TP's regular "Ugly Toy Pageant") and a now-removed article called "My Week With Marilyn" (very loosely inspired by TP's "My Week With..." review series).
  • In 2014, during the wake of Muppets Most Wanted's release, ToughPigs, the Muppet Mindset and another fansite called Muppet Stuff, had that movie's main villain Constantine take over their sites. However, TP gets bonus points for having Constantine's puppeteer Matt Vogel record a special message for the site. Throughout the day they posted all sorts of articles relating to the then-recent film, including one about the Muppets doing a concert appearance at Carnegie Hall, modeled after the ones they did in the film. (Note: Some of the articles relate to very specific events in the film, and they might not make much sense to those who haven't seen Muppets Most Wanted, so spoiler alert!)
  • 2015: The site rebranded itself into "BuzzPigs", a Shallow News Site Satire of BuzzFeed with over a dozen articles. Many of them were trolling articles - one of them, about how to be a true Muppet fan in New York City, recommended doing all sorts of ridiculous things referencing The Muppets Take Manhattan, the last of which was to walk directly in the path of an oncoming cab^note Kermit had done so in the movie, giving him Easy Amnesia. The quizzes were just as ridiculous - for the "Which Muppeteer Are You?" quiz, your result would always be "Puppeteers Do Not Exist. The Muppets are real. Please share this result with your friends. Sincerely, The Walt Disney Company."^note became Hilarious in Hindsight when the Muppeteers dropped the kayfabe during promotional appearances for The Muppets series on ABC later that year. They also boasted that they could guess your favorite Muppet. The result would always be Mildred Huxtetter (a slightly obscure Muppet rarely seen since The Muppet Show ended).
    • Notably, one of their "Muppet facts you definitely didn't know because I made them all up" was that Junior Gorg performed the wedding of two Fraggle crew members on the set, which has a bit of truth mixed into it - Richard Hunt, who voiced Junior, was the "minister" for fellow Muppeteer Jerry Nelson's wedding in Real Life.
  • 2016: The site becomes "Up Late With ToughPigs", referencing Up Late with Miss Piggy, the Show Within a Show on The Muppets. Highlights included a gallery of celebrities with the show's logo as their lips, a newsbit about Piggy's Piggy Water from "Going, Going, Gonzo" being banned in Denmark for "questionable health content" (causing her to put the country on "her list") and the show winning a Desko award... only for it to be forfeited in a follow-up report because Piggy karate-chopped its presenter for pushing her Berserk Button.
  • 2017: During a period where the Muppets were hardly doing anything, the site "renewed its dedication to Muppet news" with a series of articles that reeked of Worst News Judgment Ever and/or subtly mocked Disney for not doing anything with the Muppets.
  • In 2018 they put up a slew of Muppet and Henson-related Spinoff Babies articles in keeping with the then-recent Muppet Babies reboot. (The original Muppet Babies was the Trope Codifier for this practice.)
  • In 2019, during Sesame Street's 50th anniversary celebrations, all of the articles from that day were devoted to Sesame's lesser-known anniversary specials (none of which actually exist, of course). For example, the 6th anniversary, which was hosted by a syndicated talk show host named Allison Frooblegoob, who clearly hadn't seen any of Sesame Street. Or the 24th anniversary, which was mostly just a reunion special from the cast of Taxi. Or the 140th anniversary special, which would supposedly air 90 years into the future.
  • In 2020, every article that day was related to Sam and Friends, the earliest Muppet show. The site was even made black and white for the occasion. Perhaps not coincidentally, the show's 65th anniversary was that year.
  • In 2021, inspired by the fan campaign for Zack Snyder's Justice League, the theme for this year was #ReleaseTheToughPigsCut, which demanded recuts of things such as The Muppet Movie, Muppets Most Wanted, and A Muppet Family Christmas. The most notable article of the bunch is the one for The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, which is absurdly short (the shortest ToughPigs had ever done, in fact).
  • 2022: The previous year, as part of their 20th anniversary celebrations, they had put out The Great Muppet Mural, a richly detailed portrait featuring hundreds of Muppet characters in their element. Their April Fools joke for this year involved a less appealing follow-up to said mural, with an odd collection of characters (such as the version of Grover seen in a horribly off model comic sent out to Big Boy restaurants in The '70s, along with an overabundance of Chip^note one of them being the baby version from the 2018 April Fools event) and clashing artstyles. They also put out a joke making-of documentary in tandem with the "project".
  • 2023 saw them announce a new venture: selling Muppet NFTs. They spent two additional articles trying to explain the concept of NFTs before announcing their NFTs were stolen by scammers and moving on to cryptocurrency. (For the record, they have previously been very critical of the practice and posted a few articles denouncing the harmful impacts of NFTs.)
  • 2024: The site announced bizarre merchandise for the Muppets, Sesame Street, the Jim Henson Company, and the site itself. The last piece of merchandise in each article was a rock - i.e. a regular rock with a graphic slapped onto it. Even ToughPigs themselves, with the "We Just Wanted a Rock Too" Rock.
• Tumblr:
  • In 2014, they encouraged users to upgrade to "Tumblr Pro", not explaining what was so special about it. Those who clicked it received nothing more than a fedora placed on their avatar for the rest of the day.
  • For 2015, they debuted an "Executive Suite 2015", complete with spreadsheets, a notepad, and a calculator (which didn't work). Also, if you tried the "free trial", your blog got a business-esque addendum to its name, and your dashboard was overrun by a "helpful" Clippy-esque icon: A copy machine named Coppy which you couldn't get rid of (clicking its X caused it to go away for about 3 seconds before it popped up again). Coppy subsequently became a hit among users.
  • In 2016, the site piggybacked on the hype regarding the U.S. presidential elections by unleashing "Decision 2016", in which users were asked to vote for one of four lizards (Rick, Wretched Tooth, Deborah, and Mop). Voting would cause an "I Voted" sticker to appear above your profile picture for the remainder of the day.
  • In 2017, the site introduced a simple Tamagotchi-like virtual pet where bloggers had to clean up after a pixel-art horse with a randomly-generated (and often quite silly) name.
  • In 2018, they introduced "Tumblcoin", a cryptocurrency acquired by liking and reblogging posts that could be exchanged for additions onto the dashboard, such as the aforementioned virtual horse pet, a frame around the avatar, an AIM skin for the messenger, and the "missing E" in the logo.
  • In 2019, they created a blog bot called Tumblr Memories, which would personalize posts for the viewer by inputting tags and usernames frequently used on their blog into premade posts, Mad Libs style. This backfired, however, for users who frequently used trigger warnings, as a lack of forbidden words in the code led to custom posts that said things like "Pour one out for #abuse."
  • In 2021, they introduced a button that said "Summon the Tumblrcryptid," which parodied the cryptocurrency NFTs. Clicking it would generate a Non-Fungible Tumblcryptid, a simplistic blob creature with an introduction to their personality, formatted as, "Hi! My name is [weird name]. I love [something most people like]. I hate [something most people dislike]. Like my parent, I can't get enough of #[tag from your Tumblr blog]." You could post this to your blog with the tag #NFTumblcryptids.
  • In 2022, they added several click-based minigames to the dashboard, courtesy of an odd fictionalized marketing businessman named Brick Whartley.
  • In 2024, Tumblr added a boop-o-meter. Opting in lets you "boop" other users (pat them with a kitty paw), with a running count of the amount given and received, along with overall boops given by all participating users.
• In 2015, Twitch made the infamous "Kappa" emoticon become a question-mark silhouette when used in chat. How do you get the actual Kappa emote? By typing "Grey Face" with no spaces.
• From 2005 to 2009, VGMaps.com: The Video Game Atlas used to feature maps for fake video games. In order, these are The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Advance, Mega Man Solid X: Guns Of The Mavericks (solid-x.com links dead), Super Kid Icarus, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Of Hours, and Metroid Dread^NoteThe last one is mostly unrelated to the actual Metroid Dread.
• Video Game Critic has done a review of a ridiculously fake video game every year since 2013.
  • 2013: BioShock 2600 for the Atari 2600, an ambitious attempt at a Video Game Demake for a console not fit for running it. The publisher, Spiral Rift, is an anagram of "April First".
  • 2014: The Hobbit for the Atari 2600, a supposed unearthed prototype that depicts everything from the original novel (Frodo, Gandalf, the dwarves, the orcs, the ring) as colorful squares. The review parodies some of the blockier Atari games like Adventure.
  • 2015: Fifty Shades of Grey for the Atari 2600, a Custer's Revenge clone. The review serves as a Take That! towards that game and other pornographic Atari titles.
  • 2016: Dead or Alive Backgammon for the Xbox One, a "sexy" backgammon title. Parodies the shameless fanservice of the Dead or Alive Extreme sub-series.
  • 2017: Strip Poker II for the Virtual Boy, a strip poker game in a system that is infamous for its low color palette and inability to be used for extended periods of time.
  • 2018: Distracted Driver for the PlayStation 4, a silly budget title built around Action Commands that has you send text messages, take selfies and drink coffee while trying to avoid pedestrians and dodging the police.
  • 2019: Civilization: Flat Earth Edition for the Xbox One, where series creator Sid Meier attempts to push forward the flat Earth theory. A lot of the review is built around the reviewer being skeptical at first, but eventually giving in to the conspiracy.
  • 2020: Bob Ross Going Ape S—t for the Sega Genesis, a found prototype based on Toki. The review goes into detail on the graphic violence within the game being contrary to Ross' persona.
  • 2021: NCAA Football 21 for the PlayStation 4. The series had just been announced for revival a few months prior, and the review parodies the "annual release" formula by having code be blatantly reused from the previous game (such as the copyright in the title screen). The game also contains several references to the COVID-19 Pandemic, such as sparse crowds, the players wearing masks (which double as a way to avoid getting sued for using real life players' likenesses), games being cancelled due to outbreaks and enforced social distancing.
  • 2022: Realsports Cornhole for the Atari 5200, a hack of the homebrew game Realsports Curling. The review is a Take That! to the large number of titles in the series by choosing an odd sport to build a game around.
  • 2023: Spinal Tap: Smell The Glove for the Atari 2600, a minigame collection that adapts a few of the movie's most famous scenes. The review plays along to the movie's joke by acting as if it's based on a real band.
  • 2024: Space Invaders VR for the Atari 2600, a title for Atari's "upcoming" virtual reality headset that transports the player to an early-'80s living room (complete with accurate smells!) to play Space Invaders on their TV, but fails due to the headset being extremely clunky and heavy to the point of unusability, as well as the advertising promoting it being ridiculously fake.
• Even Wikipedia gets down with it. Along with users making dumb requests for deletion or adminship, the "Did you know" section of the main page gets reallycreative wording choices, and Today's Featured Article is an odd choice:
  • 2007: George Washington, inventor of instant coffee whose attempt at becoming president didn't pan out.
  • 2008: Ima Hogg (who didn't have sisters named "Ura" and "Hoosa")
  • 2009: Museum of Bad Art
  • 2010: Wife selling
  • 2011: Cock Lane ghost (which for being named "Fanny", had all the Double Entendre it could: 'Fanny scratching in 18th-century London's Cock Lane'...)
  • 2012: Pigeon photography
  • 2013: ?
  • 2014: Disco Demolition Night
  • 2015: Invisible rail
  • 2016: Gregor MacGregor (writing a con man's story about a fictional Central American country he ran as if it was real)
  • 2017: Nominative determinism
  • 2021: Groundhog Day, with a very repetitive blurb (it had been a legitimate featured article on February 2 of that same year)
• Wing Commander CIC, a Wing Commander online fandom news site, changes the main site's look to something silly on April 1st, and posts "news" articles that are loaded with take thats, at themselves and others, often along with joke announcements of fictional new WC releases.
• The Wizards of the Coast message board has had some good ones. One instance that sticks out is having everyone's avatar switched with one of the My Little Pony pictures. It quickly got out of hand when people who linked to their wizards avatars on other message boards saw the change, and thought the Wiz_0's(mods) were following them.
  • They also once announced a Mattel merger between My Little Pony and Dungeons and Dragons. The pink beholder graphic with bows on its eyestalks remains iconic...
• Worst Episode Ever, a fan podcast ranking the worst episodes of The Simpsons, had three April Fool episodes:
  • Episode 25: Guardians of the Miami, released in 2015, is actually a review of the Empty Nest episode "Mom's The Word"
  • 2016's Episode 75: Beethoven's Tenth, is an actual Simpsons episode review (specifically, "Last Exit to Springfield"), albeit a bogus one as it is reimagined as a Parody Episode of Last Exit to Brooklyn. Plus, it was a Season 4 episode, as the podcast only reviews episodes from Season 10 and beyond (with Season 9's "The Principal and the Pauper" being a special exception).
  • In 2017, Episode 99: Erection Inflection features a review of an utterly fake Simpsons episode known as "One Fish, Apu Fish, Ned Fish, Disco Stu Fish", supposedly the 17th episode of Season 41. (This one was released a few days early.)
• Michael Bukowski is an artist who runs the Yog-Blogsoth blog, where he showcases his illustrations of creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos and other horror media. On April Fools, he typically posts an illustration of some completely ridiculous monster from an unusual source.
• YouTube runs regular April Fools' Day pranks.
  • 2008: During the height of the rickrolling craze, YouTube linked every front page video to the infamous Rick Astley song. Kongregate pulled a similar trick.
  • 2009: YouTube took a page from Homestar Runner and flipped the site (and videos!) upside down. This lasted even beyond the date itself with a URL suffix. However, it didn't always work (For example, if you're using a YouTube userscript for the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox.) Some videos also weren't completely fixed afterward and will flip upside down when put into high quality.
  • 2010: YouTube put a "text-only mode", displaying certain videos as entirely made of text in various colors—including nearly any video with resolution greater than 360p, not just videos Youtube had done manually. This effectively made Ascii Shading Art. Sadly, it's long gone, and not even available by URL anymore. There also was a cat (who you may know as Ceiling Cat) peeking through the video processing icon. See it here.
  • 2011: YouTube had a 1911 mode, claiming to be videos made in 1911, including "The Irksome Citrus", "Horse & Buggy Crash" (wherein one is Ruth Roll'd), and "Flugelhorn Feline". The videos are in sepia while old-time music plays over the audio. With intertitles in modified Antiquated Linguistics (Alert. We have a fornicator in Lincoln Heights!"). Viewers delighted in leaving comments written in the same style.
  • 2012: YouTube brings out "The YouTube Collection", where you can purchase YouTube in its entirety on DVD, packaged and shipped to you in a convenient 100,000-disc collection! You could also get trending videos on Laserdisc, royalty-free soundtracks on Vinyl, and weather-proof shelves when your collection gets too big for your house.
  • 2013: YouTube is finished! That's right, it's now time to choose the best YouTube video ever, so the site is shutting down, and going to spend the next ten years reviewing every single video on the site to pick the best one. The winner will receive a $500 stripend for their next creative endeavor and an MP3 player that clips to your sleeve. This prank culminated in a roughly twelve-hour live stream consisting of two announcers reading out the names and descriptions of the nominees (read: any possible random video on the site), fraught with technical difficulties and ending with about fifteen minutes of the announcers sleeping it off without any real conclusion.
  • 2014: YouTube put up a video claiming they were responsible for all the world's most popular viral videos, announcing the "new trends" for viral videos in 2014: "Clocking", "Kissing Dad", and the "Glub Glub Water Dance". Other trends were announced, including "Getsyburg Addressing", "Cake-Bumping", "Nap-Cams", "Geology", "Wolf-Mask Tee Ball", "The Harlem Shake (Again)", and "1000 Dollar Gifting".
  • 2015: YouTube decides to cash in on the "Darude - Sandstorm" craze for 2015's April Fools Day. The video bar for all videos had an "Add Music" button added to it which, when clicked, played one of four snippets of Sandstorm. Also, most if not all search results had "Did you mean: Darude - Sandstorm by Darude" at the top.
  • 2016: The player has a "Snoopavision" button added to it, which allows you to view any video in the eyes of Snoop Dogg. Well, almost any video. Clicking any videos with the Snoopavision icon that weren't pre-Snoopafied by the developers will tell you that the Snoopafied video will be ready by some random and far-off date (eg. 3/19/2146).

Web Videos

• A fanmade account, 1PressL2P, covers moments for The Runaway Guys playthroughs.
  • On April Fools 2018, a highlight reel for Chapter 1 of the group's Dokapon Kingdom project was released, while the ongoing best moments series for their playthrough of Rayman Legends was still ongoing at the time. The main video was actually highlights of a vlog from a Player 4, Stephen Georg.
  • The same was done again for the following year. This time a video was uploaded as the Top 10 Moments from the guy's LP of Tri Force Heroes (which was expected at the time as voting had ended before April 1st). But once again, the video was more highlights from a vlog from a Player 4, Stephen Georg with the guys.
• Joseph Anderson uploaded a 12-minute analysis of Google Chrome's "T-Rex Runner," the game you can play on the browser when you don't have internet. The video plays the analysis entirely straight until the end, where he concludes... that Super Mario Odyssey is a 6/10.
• angelarts' VA Let's Play Earthbound was updated in April 1st 2013 stating that it was canceled. An additional video was added later that day stating that it was, indeed, an April Fools' Day joke.
• Alexander Avila has done a couple of April Fool's videos. He did a joke video on the famous gay film Brokeback Mountain with him joking how subtle the "subtext" is. He did a follow up video on Dean and Castiel from Supernatural which consisted of him reading a fanfic. His video on Perry the Platypus and Heinz Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb was a parody of ASMR videos rather than an actual video analyzing the ship between the two.
• Bad Creepypasta: On April 2014, the crew did a reading of the My Little Pony fanfic "Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles)", except not really — they were reading off a baking recipe for cupcakes.
• Binging with Babish makes an April Fools' episode every year since 2019:
  • In 2019, he showcased a recipe for jelly-filled donuts from Pokémon: The Series. A day later, he uploaded a recipe for onigiri, the actual item the characters ate in said scene.
  • In 2020^note although the episode was uploaded on March 31, curiously enough, he uploaded the recipe for the Imaginary Pie from Hook... but since the pie was imaginary, the first half of the video consists of him merely miming the process of making the actual pie. The second half of the video has him actually making the pie, while also showing the "imaginary" footage from the first half in the corner, making sure to make the same goofs and mistakes to mimic the real footage perfectly.
  • In 2021, the recipe for Gotcha Pork Roast from Food Wars! (which is a potato dish presented as a pork roast, in keeping with the April Fools spirit) was uploaded, hosted by Alvin Zhou mimicking Babish's famous mannerisms instead of Babish himself.
• The series Boundary Break, which looks at Dummied Out content and other secrets in classic video games, have made a string of parody videos in collaboration with Hat-Loving Gamer.
  • In 2018, they released a video on Super Mario Bros.. The first few claims seem plausible at first, but it takes a turn for the ridiculous when the cause of the game's Ratchet Scrolling is revealed to be Pak E. Derm from Yoshi's Story following Mario around with a sign. It then gets sillier by showing early versions of Isle Delfino (attached to one of the underwater levels) and New Donk City.
  • In 2019, they released a video on Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which similarly progresses from plausible to silly (the number of Tails clones waiting above the screen for his Resurrective Immortality to kick in) to ridiculous (what happens to the freed animals when they leave the screen).
  • The two accounts didn't work together in 2020, but Hat-Loving Gamer made a video on Pokémon Snap, which has him discovering and photographing Missingno. with disatrous results.
  • In 2021, they worked together on a Pokémon Snap video. Again, the first few claims seem plausible but gradually get sillier, with a jelly donut in Professor Oak's lab, battles going on inside the volcano, references to Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, and an unused race track with an appearance by Captain Falcon.
• British Sitcom History (a podcast dedicated to discussion of British sitcoms, with a YouTube exclusive series based on the more forgotten ones) for April Fools Day 2022 did a Forgotten Sitcoms video on When the Whistle Blows, a Show Within a Show on Extras which the video treats as if it was an actual sitcom which had fallen into obscurity.
• Chrontendo said once that he was going to review every game released for the Philips CD-I on 1 April 2012. A day later, he posted this video and people started to realize that he was joking.
• In April 1st 2009, Chuggaaconroy did an intentionally poor Let's Play of Mega Man 2, as a parody of all the bad LPs the game was receiving.
  • In April 1st, 2011, he posted a Tweet that stated that his 14th LP would be Pikmin 2. His 14th LP was actually Luigi's Mansion, but his 15th LP, starting the day after Luigi's Mansion, WAS Pikmin 2.
  • In April 1st, 2020, he posted a single-episode playthrough of Super Mario Land; the first game to feature Princess Daisy as a nod to the Running Gag on The Runaway Guys regarding Emile's... unique relationship with her. The Let's Play itself was straight-forward and up to Chugga's usual standards, but it remains his shortest LP to date.
• CinemaSins:
  • Though they uploaded the video a day early, the web series pranked its audience in 2014 by making a "What's the Damage?" video for Titanic (1997). It was a 10+ minute long video... that was over in 30 seconds. One (1) Titanic: $7.5 million 1912 dollars. The rest of the video is mostly a black screen, sprinkled with a few of the usual funny bits.
  • For April Fools 2015, they uploaded "Everything Wrong With White Olympus House Has Fallen Down", which mashes together White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen — two films with an extremely similar premise and story — and treats it as if it's one singular movie.
  • On April 1, 2016, they covered the infamously horrible Troll 2. However, instead of pointing out every flaw that the movie has, they instead find nothing but good things to say about it, and remove a sin every single time. The sin counter goes to -10,000 until the narrator nitpicks how the ending played out, adding all those sins back and gives the movie a final sin counter of zero. The movie's sentence? Trolled, which is followed by Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".
  • In 2020, they sin The Avengers (1998), assuming it's The Avengers (2012). They get confused over why Black Widow is renamed Emma Peel, where Iron Man and Hulk are, and why the helicarrier has been downgraded to a double-decker bus, among other things.
• In 2014, cobanermani456 announced a playthrough of Shadow the Hedgehog (while the video was indeed a joke, he eventually gave in and made a legitimate playthrough of the actual game)
• Critical Role:
  • On April Fool's Day 2019, in the middle of their Kickstarter for The Legend of Vox Machina, the channel released a "sneak peek" of the show... in the style of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.
  • For April Fool's Day 2021, the channel released a video with a proof-of-concept pitch for a Critical Role Land theme park, a long-running joke among the creators and fandom.
• Dan and Phil:
  • DanAndPhilCRAFTS, a parody channel spun-off of DanAndPhilGAMES featuring an almost robot-like Parallel Universe version Dan and Phil, who create strange arts and crafts videos that increasingly turn into horrific ritual practices with every release. Originally a trilogy launched in 2015 with subsequent videos in 2016 and 2017, the channel returned in 2024 with an actual horror short film.
  • In the years they didn't do DAPC, Dan and Phil would do other April Fool's Day gags, like hours-long Pigeon Fest and Norman Fest streams of their balcony and fish tank respectively, an Stereo show in 2021 pretending it's 2011, and fake OnlyPhans announcement in 2023.
• Danganronpa Re:Birth was initially intended by Miwashiba to be a hoax announcement of a new Danganronpa game for April 1st, 2017. The positive reception resulted in an expansion of the concept.
• Dead Meat: In 2019, James made a video where it looks like he's going to do a Kill Count of Avengers: Infinity War, before saying "April Fools," and instead does one to the Boy Meets World episode "And Then There Was Shawn."
• For April 1, 2022, Dominic Noble (formerly known as The Dom Reviews, and occasional collaborator with Overly Sarcastic Productions) released an episode of his "Lost In Adaptation" series comparing The Room (2003) with a Polish book he thinks the film plagiarized, "The Room I Died In"...which was written by a man named Prima Aprilis, whose portrait is just Blue from OSP with a beard edited on him^note Also of note is how Blue's favorite city is Venice, where Prima Aprilis apparently died from drowning. The rest of the video then does its best to convince viewers that the book is real, at least up until trying to discuss the book's ending, in which (as a reference to The Disaster Artist) the main character turns out to have secretly been a vampire.
• A Dose of Buckley:
  • 2012 had "A Dose of Becky", Buckley's "Distaff Counterpart".
  • 2013 had the first standalone episode of "Jason's J'opinions", which is Buckley's parody of the stereotypical amateurish YouTube vlogger.
  • 2014 had "A Touch of Class" with Reginald Wentworth, where Buckley announces the crass, cynical angry humour would be replaced with a more refined and high brow British programme.
  • 2015 had "Douchebags of the Internet" with Realtalk Rudy, which is a Stylistic Suck parody of Buckley's "Scumbags of the Internet" series, with Buckley on the receiving end of Rudy's rant.
  • 2016 had "Collaboration Videos", where I Hate Everything hijacks Buckley's video and vice versa. Both Buckley and Alex rip on the concept of making collaboration videos on YouTube.
  • 2017 had "How It's Created: YouTube Videos", where he shows how a typical amateur YouTube video is created, done in the style of How It's Made.
  • 2018 had "'Epic Cat Prank' with Brogan Lolz", Buckley's parody of high-profile YouTubers, more specifically Logan Paul.
  • After there was no video in 2019 due to his hiatus, Buckley returns in 2020 with "Movies Made 'Woke'", where Buckley redubs the ending of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to fit current year trends.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
  • In 2016, Team Four Star supposedly released the long-awaited Broly Abridged movie, with its description stating that Markiplier and JonTron would be having a role in the movie... except it was actually an abridged parody of Digimon: The Movie.
  • In 2019, the same team released what seemed to be a re-abridging of the Cell story arc...but was actually an abridging of the Garlic Jr. arc that they had intentionally skipped before.
• Drawfee: In 2024, they released a perfectly normal Morning Drawfee with no editing, a simplified format, awkward and nervous banter, and Julia and Karina in the background recreating the chatter from the CollegeHumor office. They even did an actual request from nine years ago.
• Fascinating Horror makes it an annual tradition to release a mockumentary on April 1 every year, describing the plot of a movie as though it was one of the real life disasters that the channel usually covers:
  • On April Fool's Day 2021, they uploaded "The Amity Bay Shark Attacks", a mockumentary that presents the events of Jaws as if they really happened, in an identical style to the rest of the channel's actual documentaries.
  • For 2022, they uploaded "The Isla Nublar Incident", another mockumentary presenting the events of Jurassic Park as if they really happened.
  • In 2023, it was The Poseidon Adventure's turn to get the mockumentary treatment via "The Sinking of the SS Poseidon".
  • In 2024, they uploaded "The Glass Tower Disaster", describing the plot of the 1974 film, The Towering Inferno.
• Feather Adventures: The non-canonical episode "Playing Tag", released on April 1st, sees Sqaishey in Stampy's Lovely World but pretending that they're still in Feather Adventures, down to calling Fizzy Elephant and William Beaver (two of Stampy's NPC Helpers) "Ebby" and "Stori" (the names of Sqaishey's rabbits) and claiming that the Love Garden was the Feather Friends Pond.
• FoxTale2614: In 2023, the channel released a video that was billed as a face reveal, but it's actually an NPCarlsson-inspired music video and song parody of "When I Grow Up" featuring the Time Twins that serves as a sequel to "acronix discovers the internet".
• Game Grumps has several April Fools jokes:
  • April 2014: "Cat Grumps," featuring ten minutes of cats doing random things. There was also "Meow Train", replacing Steam Train on the same day.
  • April 2015: Toon Grumps. Saying the show was cancelled, Arin & Ross spend an hour doing animation while Ross sketches a Starbomb video.
  • April 2016: Arin & Danny play Skyward Sword. Except there's no gameplay footage because they decided to do only face cam focusing on them instead.
  • April 2017: Arin debuted a new series called g that broke down the show's structure to a minimalist form, changing the series logo and uploading two "Let's Plays" that consisted of white screens with indiscernible images shown while a stream of random words were said for the whole video. They also to further the ideas of g on their Twitter, even after April Fools ended.
  • For April Fools 2021, RubberRoss revived Steam Train, Ross and Danny's abandoned let's play series, except this time Ross played by himself, with very awkward commentary and constant technical difficulties.
• The Geek Critique:
  • In 2022, a followup to their Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! review was posted, but all of the gameplay footage depicted Dixie by herself, and any appearance by Kiddy Kong, including the title screen and the cartridge art, was edited out.
  • 2023 saw the release of "The End of Sonic's Origins", presented as a lost episode from 2014. It seemed to be set up as an episode about Sonic 3D Blast for the Sega Saturn, only to talk about Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble 16-Bit as if it was an official yet obscure Sega Genesis game, even claiming that you unlock Knuckles by locking the cartridge onto Sonic & Knuckles. Unlike the DKC3 video, they were more upfront about this being an April Fool joke towards the end of the video. The following day, the video was renamed "The End of Sonic the Hedgehog's Genesis", and the 3D Blast artwork of Sonic in the thumbnail was changed to his artwork from Sonic Labyrinth (while changing the background from Casino Night Zone to the remake's interpretation of Great Turquoise Zone).
• Geography Now:
  • The Bandiaterra episode is the first in Barby's annual April Fool's tradition where he talks in detail about a country that doesn't exist. It's followed by Limberwisk, Patch Amberdash, Qitzikwaka, Sovonthak, Volanca, Ululiona-Linulu, and finally Geolandia, which has Barby shill his merchandise in the guise of sharing his experience as a native Geolandian.
  • "PGC Brey: What are the "kind of" countries?", a video exploring partially-recognized countries as well as microstates, imitates the style of fellow edutainment YouTuber CGP Grey.
  • "Geometry Now!", where Barby discusses geometry, except that it's also riddled with overly-distracting on-screen captions.
• An annual tradition for Canadian Geometry Dash YouTuber GD Colon:
  • 2016: He posted a Minecraft gameplay video.
  • 2017: He posted a parody of "How to create a GD texture pack" videos.
  • 2018: He posted a parody of CowBelly's "Comment Awards" series, claiming to be the sixth instalment of his "Geometry Dash Copies" series.
  • 2019: He posted a parody of "level requests" videos where he attempts to play Extreme Demon levels and fails at all of them.
  • 2020: He posted a video where he claimed to be a beta tester for the upcoming 2.2 update. The video included references to community in-jokes (like every cube icon being replaced by the infamous 5 bonus shards icon, the editor being removed from the PC version and the main levels being replaced by those of The Impossible Game) and recent memes (like Megalovania, The Backrooms and Uganda Knuckles).
  • 2021: He posted a video showing an overly-complicated method of obtaining the 150th secret coin in the game. The method involves "destroying" the "world" of Geometry Dash World, cryptic messages appearing on RobTop's account, giving the Shopkeeper a $20 Steam code to access his lair and a ''Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver ROM hack depicting a battle between the Demon Guardian^note Gengar and the so-called "burning chicken"^note Blaziken.
  • 2022: He posted a video about increasingly-absurd unused content in Geometry Dash.
  • 2023: He posted a video claiming to be him reviewing the hardest Demon levels in Geometry Dash, but it quickly turns into a video of him reviewing personifications of Geometry Dash levels.
• On April 1, 2017, the Hobo Bros uploaded a video claiming to be footage of a new Five Nights at Freddy's game. It was actually Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, a children's game about a friendly teddy bear.
• A compilation of every single Happy Wheels video Jacksepticeye ever made, for April 1st 2024. Hope you have the rest of your day cleared (literally).
• Life SMP: The Real Life SMP was a one-off special released on April 1st, 2024, where the players are participating in the season under the first season's rules in Minecraft VR. Shenangians and motion sickness ensue.
• Lost In Google: The episode "Lord of Bananas", released on April 1st, 2012, is actually a joke by the creators. The real episode was released on the following day.
• Mad Because Small released "Mad Because Leather Daddy", a new version of the original "Mad Because Small", but starring a very horny Roe.
• The April 1 episode of Madd Man was not in fact about John Maddaloni trying to do a stunt and looking lame, but actually a fake trailer for a melodrama with hand puppets. Well, not puppets, just hands...
• Marphitimus Blackimus (known in part on his insightful videos on various aspects of the Half-Life series) released a video on April 1, 2019 called "Half-Life 2 - Every Watermelon in the Series", which was Exactly What It Says on the Tin. On the same day, he released a supposed "leaked movie clip" from a live-action Half-Life adaptation (actually a clip from Kamillions with the mad scientist character played by Harry S. Robins, who also plays Dr. Kleiner in Half-Life.)
• In 2023, MasaeAnela makes a gag Virtual Youtuber debut on Twitch as Mipha, her pet bird.
• April Fool's is the only holiday TheMidnightFrogs celebrate every year, making parodies of something different each time. Thus far they've "abridged" paper, a wedding video, the short film version of Crash, the first episode of Sonic X, and they switched the character voices from the first episode of their Sgt. Frog Abridged.
• Minecraft Championship: "MCC Scuffed" was a special event that took place on April 1st, 2023. It brought back several retired events (e.g. Skyblockle) and old versions of current events (e.g. the original Build Mart set-up), added twists to otherwise regular games that made them more difficult (e.g. TGTTOSAWAF had fall damage and random effects implemented), and — as the title indicates — the entire event gave off the implication that the organizers hastily put it together at the last minute.
• Mother's Basement has released April Fools videos from 2016 to 2019. 2016's gag is a "What's in an OP?" of Cory in the House, which he described as a masterpiece of an anime. '17 and '18's are parodies of the formats from Game Theory and WatchMojo respectively. And '19's was a "What's in an OP?" of the first Shrek film.
• The YouTube channel n0Rtist uploaded a video claiming to be about designing feminine Pokémon, and for the first fifteen seconds it seems to be setting up the premise to be just that, only for the author to say, "But before we talk about ladies, we'll need to brush up on your math." The rest of the video is recycled from an earlier video on designing a Calculus-inspired Pokémon from the author's self-introduction onward, except the "thanks for watching" message at the end, which has a "Happy April Fools Day" greeting.
• On March 30, 2019, Nerrel, the developer of an enhanced The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask texture pack, announced he was cancelling the project due to being convinced the official Nintendo 3DS remake made it unnecessary, and revealed he was working on a high-definition remastering of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, before offering a bonus to Patreon donors to help fund the game. Of course, this is all just a setup for the first minute of the actual April Fools Day video, which starts off as an emotional appology video claiming Nintendo and Philips are suing him for the unauthorized Wand of Gamelon remake.
• Panda Fighting Games uploaded a video of their Smash Pros attempting Ryu's Street Fighter IV trials for April Fools 2022. It (mostly) goes about as well as you'd expect.
• On March 31, 2019, pannenkoek2012 uploaded a Super Mario 64 video showing a Koopa Troopa's movement paths... in real time and as a premiere video, meaning that viewers could watch and chat over a video of a Koopa Troopa running around aimlessly in Bob-omb Battlefield for several hours.
• PBS Idea Channel:
  • 2013: "Is Vine The Future of Cinema?"
  • 2014 "What Does IKEA Say About The Human Condition?". This was eventually made into a real episode called "SRSLY What Does IKEA Say About The Human Condition?"
  • 2015: "What Does The Chunnel Say About European Diplomacy?", which is just footage of the chunnel leading to the Idea Channel logo and Mike giving a brief message at the end.
• Phelous has made quite a few videos for April Fool's Day, most of which reflect his affinity for meta humor:
  • In 2010, he made a short review for Army of Darkness that mostly consisted of minor nitpicks and missing the point of the film, such as not understanding that the movie had two alternate endings made.
  • In 2011, Phelan poked fun at the controversy surrounding the departure of the Tenth Doctor by killing off Phelous at the end of a review and replacing him with the "New Phelous", who promised a new direction for the show. The next video had him review the first Twilight movie, only to get bored and switch topics several times before Phelous D1 killed him and caused him to regenerate back to the original Phelous.
  • In 2012, Phelous reviewed the first episode of Mortal Komedy, his old Mortal Kombat parody series. He spent the entire video calling the bad comedy and production design, all while remaining oblivious to the fact he was the original creator.
  • In 2013, he reviewed Marvel Universe: The Book of the Dead in the style of Atop the Fourth Wall, complete with knock-offs of Linkara's supporting cast and a lampooning of his storylines. Eventually, the real Linkara shows up in order to save Phelous's ship from Phelous D1.
  • In 2014, Phelous reviewed a bootleg copy of Pokémon Gold for his "Bootleg Zones" series. As he plays through the game, it turns out to be a copy of Pokémon Lost Silver and Phelous eventually succumbs to Lavender Town Syndrome before dying.
  • In 2015, Phelous reviewed his very first review of Mac and Me, a review he hates due to his bad acting and poor jokes.
  • In 2016, he did an episode of "Bootleg Zones" covering some shoddily-made wooden Star Wars figurines he and his friends made back when they were kids. He gives them a glowing review, and scores them a perfect 10/10 across every category.
  • In 2017, Phelous posted what initially appeared to be a review of the 2016 remake of Cabin Fever. It did turn out to be a remake of Cabin Fever, only it was done in the style of the films made by Dingo Pictures.
  • In 2018, he posted "Phelous and the Movies EXPLAINED", which recapped his videos up to that point and tried to extrapolate a deeper meaning behind his silly sketches.
  • In 2019, he posted an episode of "Old Man Reads Creepypastas" where he reads "The Scariest Story in the Universe". Said story was a parody of bad Creepypastas about an overly paranoid man who believes that a regular copy of Silent Hill is actually a cursed video game.
  • In 2020, Phelous did a review of what he claimed was a pilot for The Real Ghostbusters animated by Goodtimes Entertainment ^note In reality, it was made for the episode by Harry Partridge. He sprinkled the video with facts that were either Blatant Lies, random tangents, contradictions, or outright nonsense.
  • In 2021, Phelous did a video explaining the "Dingo Pictures Iceberg". For the most part, it's an accurate and detailed look regarding the various aspects of the company until the end of the video, where Phelous adds his own tier dubbed the "Darker than Dark Abyss". This tier claims that Dingo Pictures' existence was a Grandfather Paradox created by a self-aware, time travelling Wabuu the raccoon, then ridicules Super Mario 64 conspiracy theories.
  • In 2022, Phelous did a review of his review of his Mac and Me review, mining as much meta humor as he can from a video that was already loaded with it.
  • In 2023, Phelous did a video counting down the top 10 scariest videos on his channel, parodying the Top 10 youtuber Chills. The video uses a text-to-speech program to emulate Chills' voice, complete with constantly misprouncing Phelous' name and accusing various things as Skinwalkers or Rakes.
  • In 2024, Phelous made fun of pretentious video essays by doing a video about the theological and ethical questions surrounding body swaps by analyzing the Garfield and Friends episode "Fair Exchange". However, Phelous constantly veers off-topic and goes on pointless tangents (such as talking about different shows, or reading dictionary definitions), which he admits is just to pad out the length of the video.
• Playing With Mah Wii has done an April Fool's Day every year. The first one was titled "Playing With Mah Wii gets featured on Youtube!" which is really him reading The Other Wiki's article on April Fool's Day. Sometimes his AFD videos were on the first part of a playthrough that fans have wanted, only for them to not be the case, one of them's even a Shout-Out to Retsupurae!
• ProJared:
  • In 2015, Jared released a "Top Ten Boobs in Gaming" video. The video starts with him explaining that boobs are everywhere in video games, but then quickly states that they're stupid and so decides to instead count down the top ten dicks in gaming.
  • In 2016, Jared released a video on the topic of gameplay vs. story. He starts off by discussing the question of which is more important to a game's structure... only to then state "What good is a compelling story if you don't have dicks!" Soon afterwards, he would release another video parodying I Hate Everything's video that served as a Take That! to clickbait and reaction videos. Both of these videos have since been unlisted, however.
  • In 2017, Jared released a review on Madden NFL 17, only for the video to quickly become a joke as he reviews the game as if it were an RPG.
  • In 2020, Jared released what at first seems to be a review of Final Fantasy VII Remake, seemingly being very critical of the game... until a minute in, in which it's revealed that he's actually reviewing the infamous NES demake of Final Fantasy VII, with him proceeding to review the game in a borderline Manchild style.
• On April 1, 2020, Quinton Reviews released a Fallen Titans^note a video series on internet celebrities and phenomena that have been Condemned by History or fallen into obscurity video on Sargon of Akkad. Only it wasn't about the YouTube political commentator, but the Mesopotamian king.
  • On April 3, 2024, he released a 38-hour retrospective on The Beverly Hillbillies. It would have been released on April Fool's Day, but YouTube had probably never rendered such a long video before.
• React:
  • On April 1st 2014, the Fine Brothers premiered a new segment on the series. The subjects? Cats, of course.
  • In 2018, they had Teens React to Nothing.
• RemyRaccoon:
  • Vale's CinemaSins videos originally started as an April Fools' prank when they made an EWW about Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal in 2016, and they would continue to make them until April Fools' Day in 2020, when they closed the series with a ERAWW of the same game.
    • The EWW for Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile! was released on April 1, 2018, so Vale didn't bother to play the game, left a bunch of sins, and a mashup of Courtney Gears' boss theme and Space Jam played for the rest of the video.
  • In 2019, Vale made a 51-minute video which starts out as an unfavorable review of the Ratchet and Clank movie, but about 2 minutes and 15 seconds in, it turns into a dramatic reading of the film's script.
• In 2013, Rhett & Link posted a video on their YouTube channel entitled "Funny Baby Panda Kiss", promising just that. It has a pre-roll ad, but clicking the Skip button makes it play another ad, clicking it again shows a promo featuring the duo talking about "Funny Baby Panda Kiss", and clicking skip after that just loops it to the first ad again.
• Ross's Game Dungeon did a review of Wolfenstein (2009) that was uploaded on April 1st, 2015. It was a perfectly normal episode of the show, except that the game was modded to replace every character's head with a pumpkin. Ross did not acknowledge this at all during the episode, except for an offhand comment about how getting headshots in the game felt extremely satisfying for some strange reason that he couldn't quite put his finger on, and he continued to play dumb in the comments section when asked about it. The episode also includes a fake-out where it looks like he's finally going to talk about the pumpkin heads, but then he talks about something else instead.
• I'm Moving to Alaska by Matthew Santoro turned out to be this. Matt said that he would move to Alaska the next day, for reasons like riding seals and whales for the entertainment of Eskimos, running around with polar bears, and freezing. To his surprise, some people fell for this.It's easier if you watch for yourself.
• On April 1, 2022, Sarah Z posted a tweet advertising a four-hour video essay on Dream. The link in her tweet leads to a one-hour Rickroll.
• Schaffrillas Productions does this every year since 2018.
  • In 2018 he made a video about why the scene in The Last Jedi where Luke drinks green alien milk is "secretly brilliant".
  • In 2019, he made a parody of a nitpicky video about how the first three minutes of The Last Jedi derailed the entire film, applying that same sort of criticism to The Empire Strikes Back.
  • In 2020, he uploaded the long-awaited review of Over the Hedge that fans had been asking for all throughout the previous year. Except it's an unfavorable review, done In the Style of other YouTubers.^note He would upload a real review a month later.
  • In 2021, just after the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League, he reviewed "The Snyder Cut"... which turns out to be a review of a nonexistent recut of Shark Tale from one of his old YouTube Poops, "Doug Walker's Glowing Review of Shark Tale".
  • In 2022, he uploaded a 25-minute video where he caved to countless requests that he review Arcane, starting as a genuine review/analysis before delving into a nonsensical skit that he describes as "a backdoor pilot for a show all about General Grievous and Sid the Sloth working for Arby's and going on wacky misadventures". Other characters show up throughout, too.
  • In 2023, he claimed to have "fixed" the Blue Sky Studios ranking. It's just a reupload of the original Blue Sky ranking... but Rio 2 is suspiciously absent. Why? Because he moved it to the end of the ranking, claiming he changed his tune in regard to his opinion on it, and that he considers it to be the best movie ever. He then describes the plot through a Rio-themed parody of the aforementioned "Doug Walker's Glowing Review of Shark Tale" ("Will Smith Bird is a lion. But then they find out that the rainforest is being closed down"). But wait, there's more! Schaff goes on to mention that it contains a musical number, which he does a Stylistic Suck-laden "cover" of for our amusement. It turns out to be an off-the-cuff parody of the remake version of "I Just Can't Wait to Be King". (To be fair, the real reason this new ending is here is because the original ending's music was Screwed by the Lawyers.)
  • 2024 brought an outlandish iceberg video on Tony Soprano, whilst James openly admitted that he still hadn't seen the series he spawned from.
• Scootertrix the Abridged in 2017 reuploaded "Bean Quest", their very first attempt at an MLP Abridged Series.
• In 2020, Scott The Woz has an April Fools episode on the subject of Raid: Shadow Legends, a mobile game notorious for sponsoring too many people on YouTube; the video also covers his thoughts and feelings with YouTube sponsors in general. It ends with him being sponsored by Ziploc (a brand of plastic cling wrap) instead.
• In 2014, Seth Bling announced Minecraft snapshot 14w14a which turned out to be a Bukkit plugin.
• Smosh during April 2014 uploaded their 1-hour special video, which starts out as some parody of an action-thriller movie. Which is then immediately followed by Anthony and Ian walking around their neighborhood... for the entire hour of the video.
• SomecallmeJohnny released a ridiculously over the top review of Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I on 2010.
• In 2022, T1J and F.D. Signifier both released concurrent videos about Microaggressions, where they pretend to be each other while poking fun at people for mixing them up just because they're both black dudes with dreadlocks.
• Stop Skeletons From Fighting: He pulled a new prank on his fanbase for four years in a row:
  • 2008: He posted an audio-only vlog ripping into the AVGN (originally titled "Sick to death of hearing about the Angry Nintendo Nerd") that was actually a parody of the infamous Armake21 vlog ripping into The Irate Gamer.
  • 2009: The obligatory "Goodbye Forever" video, in which he announces his new rapping career. His band Starship Amazing even made an actual rap EP, which can be found here.
  • 2010: He switched shows with The Gaming Historian, another Retroware personality. Derek talked about Shenmue, while Norman reviewed Ristar. This is also the only April Fools prank to date in which Derek does not break character, at least not explicitly.
  • 2011: His friend and bandmate Calvin hijacked his show, and did an improvised quasi-review/playthrough of Chrono Trigger.
  • 2014: The first episode of the meme-overloaded LIKECOMMENTSUBSCRIBESHOW with "Scare Cam" Cody and The Shitty Goose as they list the Top 10 NES boobs (at least two of the listed characters don't even have any) and start going to some really weird places.
• The Templin Institute celebrates April Fools' Day every year (except 2020, when no videos were posted from February to April):
  • In 2018, they attempted to cover the Springfield Box Factory.
  • In 2019, they document the first pharmacy of the Galactic Empire.
  • In 2021, they look at Papa John's as it appeared in Ghostbusters (2016).
  • In 2022, they finally featured the SCP Foundation... in amateur fashion.
  • In 2023, they attempt to rank the galactic powers of, of all things, Frasier. (Also features Call Backs to the Box Factory and SCP videos.)
  • In 2024, they went over how the Star Wars universe doesn't work... in SONG!
• TierZoo did an entire Cryptid Episode video talking about tier listing for Cryptids for April Fools 2018. It was actually pretty legitimate for one, even giving somewhat scientific reasons for cryptid tiering such as the Chupacabra and Jackalope essentially being diseased animals and therefore low on the tier list, while the Loch Ness Monster and Mokèlé-mbèmbé were tiered high due to essentially being living prehistoric reptiles.
• turndownforwalt:
  • for 2021, he released a video about Hungrybox's iconic popoff to fainting called The popoff that killed a man, which goes into humourously questionable science and assumptions to explain how and why it went down. Amusingly, Hungrybox would later react to the video and left this comment:
    Hungrybox: pretty accurate.
  • 2023:
    • He made a video about What to expect from Smash Summit 15. ^note The Joke being that there were no longer any Smash Summits due to Beyond The Summit closing down after Smash Ultimate Summit 6. The competitors listed to be invited are of course a highly improbable group of players.
    • He made a video similar to the 2021 Hungrybox video about the infamous GIMR tech unveiling "Back to the Lab again" video/gaffe.
• TV Trash put up a review of Reality Television consisting of him yelling "REALITY TV SUCKS!", walking away, the closing credits, and ten minutes of a black screen.
• Twitch Plays Pokémon: Over the years, the stream has featured a wide variety of pranks and/or special events for April Fools Day:
  • In 2016, the entire stream was flipped upside down and all text, both in-game and on the overlay, was written backwards. Later that day, the game switched to a modified version of Crystal Anniversary in which every important name and menu option was replaced with "OLDEN", in reference to an infamous game-breaking glitch from the original run.
    • Meanwhile, on the subreddit, an announcement was made that the stream would soon move to another website, becoming "Hitbox Plays Pokémon". The subreddit banner was changed accordingly, as did its color scheme from purple to green.
  • In 2017, PBR featured a "broken jukebox", switching song every minute to the tune of a record scratch, and allowing users to bid songs for free regardless of their intended category. Crate Crates were also introduced as random rewards for players to open; unlike regular Crates, which could contain various types of stream-related items, each Crate Crate contained either another Crate Crate or... nothing at all.
  • In 2018, the on-screen name of the stream was changed to "Twitch♥Katamari™", and the entire day was spent playing the game Me & My Katamari.
  • In 2019, the stream featured a hack of Pokémon Sapphire titled Metronome Sapphire, in which all Pokémon encountered were randomized, at level 100, and had a moveset solely consisting of the move Metronome. On top of that, it was played in Turbo Anarchy mode, and was prone to random events such as a DVD logo bouncing on the screen or the emulation speed suddenly increasing.
  • In 2020, the ongoing Gauntlet Platinum run was suddenly interrupted by a Metronome Ruby intermission, complete with an overly glitchy an inaccurate overlay. It was played in Turbo Anarchy until the obtention of the first badge, and ended after the obtention of the second.
  • In 2021, the first two days of April were spent playing AFD Roulette, an assortment of randomly alternating unofficial Pokémon games ranging from previously-featured hacks, to bootlegs, to joke hacks. This was followed by a week of a special April Fools season of PBR, with gimmicks that included unusual metagame combinations (such as "Little Cup" with "Ubers"), the ability for Pokémon to attack themselves, and Ice being super effective on Bug; on top of that, matches featured both the PBR and Stadium 2 announcers, with some modes having them speak in multiple languages at once, at different pitches, or even backwards.
  • In 2022, two very short hacks, the bizarrely outlandish Pokémon: Spheal Team Six and the laughably edgy Pokémon: A Grand Day Out, were played in a row, immediately followed by a revisit of DBZ: Team Training.
  • In 2023, the stream switched to an intermission titled "Twitch Tries TemTem", which featured the heavily Pokémon-inspired independent game Temtem and lasted for the entire week.
• Unskippable: As a preemptive April Fools' Day joke, Graham and Paul's March 30, 2010 video promised to riff on Final Fantasy XIII, and instead featured "Final Fantasy III". "How much difference can one X make?"
• Vinesauce had a good one in 2015: Joel did his entire stream for that day in his native language (Swedish). He also messed around with Google Translate, translating English phrases into different languages and trying to say a few in Japanese.
  • Vinny, meanwhile, streamed Tomodachi Life with a few... alterations. Namely, three less active islanders were replaced by Jahns offscreen, and Vinny himself acted as if they assimilated him as well. However, this likely wasn't a prank, given that he still saved the changes... Either way, fans freaked out.
• The Virtual Youtuber group VShojo posted a reveal video on April 1, 2022. The reveal features some existing members in gecko form performing the torture dance.
• Watcher of the 2000s had a gag on April 1, 2014, where a review for Dragon Ball Evolution was disguised as a review for The Watcher, a movie that resembles the name of the series.
• Nash of What the Fuck Is Wrong with You? did his entire April 1, 2013 episode in character as Space Guy.
• On April 1st, 2024, a ZoomZike stream was meant to continue his Mario Party 8 playthrough. He spent the opening getting meta as the stream intro played on loop, asking the viewers if they thought there was going to be a prank — maybe he will get to the game, maybe this is just prerecorded, maybe he'll play something else, or maybe he'll just leave it on the intro. After ten minutes and a poll asking what the best punchline would be, he played a full round of Muppets Party Cruise and admitted that MP8 would continue the week after.

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